Welcome to this year’s celebratory 10th edition of the Athens Avant Garde Film Festival. On the occasion, let’s remember its glorious moments with tributes such as shoot, shoot, shoot, to Valie Export, to Harun Farocki, to Pedro Costa, to Leos Karax, to Yannis Economides and to Laura Mulvey.

This Festival, carried out within the framework of the Regional Operation- al Program of Attica and funded jointly by the European Regional Devel- opment Fund and Greece, aims to celebrate cinephilia and investigate the centrality of vision and visibility, and the modes by which independent filmmakers enhance the visual in the production of meaning.

This year we celebrate with tributes: to Manoel de Oliveira, with a retro- spective of 12 films, some of them featured for the first time in Greece, to Marco Bellocchio, in 35 mm copies, to François Truffaut in conversa- tion with Alfred Hitchcock; as well as with the standard tribute Restored and beautiful.

Eva Stefani expands the limits of visibility, with an insistence on austerity that almost verges to the ascetic. Florent Marcie, travels with his lens on the battlefields of the world not to catch the sensational but to con- template on the role of the filmmaker in the era of digital and algorithmic manipulation. Marie Losier will lead us to her ludic and gender-bender world. Whereas Robert Beavers, himself a master of the small form, will initiate us to the poetics of film archiving. Lastly, Haden Guest, Harvard’s archivist, will introduce us to the experimental and poetic work of recently departed animation artist Susan Pitt.

For the International competition, we have chosen films which experi- ment with form and often combine documentary with fiction. Ronny Sen director of Cat Sticks, Ehsan Khoshbakht director of Filmfarsi and Bar- bara Giordano, protagonist of Love me Tender will be in attendance to present their work.

In Athenian Premieres the award winning Vitalina Varella by Pedro Cos- ta and The fever by Maya Da-Rin will be screened. The program Sexual liberations, visual revolutions presents films which, beyond enhancing the visibility of LGBTΙ groups, have resulted in innovative and sublime cinematic forms.

The two tributes on Greek cinema, The modern as experiment and There is something about the family investigate how the delayed arrival of historical avant-gardes in Greece resulted in auteur and ex- perimental films of great power. The family passions investigated by modernists such as Cacoyannis and Angelopoulos led to a strong new queer/weird wave, which renewed the stagnating contemporary Greek cinema.

In this edition we enrich our educational role by organising the sec- tion Student short films, with special guests our colleagues from the University of Karlsruhe, and with films from the Communication and Media Department of the University of Athens, the Department of Cinema of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the Hellenic Parliament Television.

I would like to thank the Minister of Culture and Sports Dr. Lina Men- doni, the General Secretary for Contemporary Culture Mr. Nicolas Yi- atromanolakis, the Regional Government of Attica and the executives of the Special Management Service of the Regional Operational Pro- gram of Attica, the Board of the Foundation and those working both for the Film Archive and the SNRF. I would also like to thank Joao Ri- cardo Mendes, Deputy Head of Mission of Portugal, Anna Mondavio, Director of Italian Institute, and Theo Koutsaftis, Audiovisual Attache, of the French Institute of Athens.

Maria Komninos

Director of the 10th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival