AnafiFF 2025
The films
"The Earth We Inherit: Family, Memory, and Ecology" - Curated by Helene Stergiopoulou
In an era of climate grief and digital overload, these films recenter nature as a visceral force, one that shapes families, memories, and the legacies we carry. Through intimate storytelling, they ask: How do we mourn a dying world while nurturing new life? Can ancestral bonds guide us back to ecological reciprocity? From childbirth to burial, these works blur the boundaries between human drama and environmental awe, tracing the quiet rebellions of parenthood, the weight of inherited landscapes, and the fragile threads between species. They invite us to listen: to the murmurs of soil, the creak of ice, the breath of creatures we’ve forgotten we belong to.
Here, hands that cradle newborns also sift through the ashes of forests. Stories passed between generations become maps to navigate both personal and planetary loss. The films reveal how a mother’s lullaby echoes the sigh of endangered rivers, how the act of remembering becomes an act of ecological resistance. In this space between intimacy and immensity, grief and renewal are not opposites but companions, reminding us that we are not owners of the earth, but its inheritors and its ephemeral guests, bound to it as deeply as roots to bedrock.
"Unapologetically Her" - Curated by Stavros Markoulakis & Maya Sfakianaki
Unapologetically Her moves through the quiet storms and loud whispers of womanhood, in narratives where longing is not a gentle request, but an instinct; where desire spills over the edges, staining hands, lips, and memory. These are not tales of restraint, but of women letting go of control, following their pulse into the soft, chaotic spaces where love and self-knowledge tangle. We begin with She Stays by Marinthia Gutiérrez, where a night in downtown Tijuana unfolds like a premonition; a woman suspended between the present moment and the fate she waits to meet. In I Want to Know What Love Is by Hanna Järgenstedt, a missed train derails the night’s plan, turning the pursuit of a fleeting crush into an unpredictable detour through longing and chance. Finally, What Mary Didn’t Know by Konstantina Kotzamani carries us aboard a Mediterranean cruise, where a teenage girl wanders through the neon-lit casino decks and stumbles into the sparkling mouth of first love, tenderly and strangely. Playful yet feral, fragile yet unbreakable. Here, love is not a single note but an unruly chord: sweet, dissonant, and impossible to forget. Here, the feminine walks barefoot into the unknown, claiming every step as her own.
"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" - Curated by Klara Tsoumpleka
In a former sheep stable (μαντρί) now turned dancefloor (Μάντρες), strangers come to sweat together. Both club and stable restrain animal and human bodies into a state of enclosure. While animals endure enclosure as a form of imposed control, humans willingly submit to it - seeking escape, communion and pleasure within its bounds.
Atavistic memories are carried into the animals we all long to become. What are the spaces that contain us, and how do we carry their residue in the sweat we dispel through our common movement? Can we become what we used to be; a soft, rhythmic, leaking mass of salt, saliva and tears? “To become animal is to deterritorialize” (Deleuze and Guattari). Deterritorialization here is a seeping of self into crowd, memory into motion. Becoming animal on the dancefloor is not about mimicry, but about slipping out of prewritten shapes.
This site-specific screening approaches animality through different lenses, paying tribute to the ones that have been here before us. They trace a queer lineage of sorts, an intuitive remembrance of what we long for in rhythm; to “let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves” (Mary Oliver). The chosen films show us something new about animals and something old about ourselves.
"The Lure of the Rural" - Curated by Raisa Desypri & Katerina Markoulaki
What makes a community?
From Ireland, to Welsh, to Megara, the reality and the social realism of rural communities and their animals, blend together while ascending from realism, to allegorical narratives with folklore aesthetics .
Looking upon multiple perceptions on pastoral landscapes, each film offers a distinct lens on rural life—observing, reflecting, imagining, and dreaming the everyday, differently.
Through five artists in creative dialogue, the selection reappropriates the rural experience, touching on themes of belonging, queerness, grief, religion, tradition, and the human–nonhuman bond.
With this selection we invite the audience to experience a class between the familiar and the unknown, the mundane and the supernatural, the comfortable and the unsettling while questioning, is flora and fauna an extension of ourselves?
From Sion Thomas’ “Mauled by a dog”, to Panagiotis Papagragos “Protogala” and everywhere in between, these movies look at people, animals and places in a reciprocal relationship, shaping and being shaped by one another.
Together they delve into the dark, humorous, yet tender portrayals of rural life, through shared and personal, familial and collective experiences, while reminding us that there are many things unseen behind closed doors in their small communities.
