By Christos Zampounis

When the Lumière brothers discovered the cinema, there were many Cassandras who predicted its complete domination over the theatre. The same happened with Cinema when television was invented. Then came the era of video films, which dealt blows to the aforementioned entertainment genres, until streaming platforms came along to fundamentally disrupt the way we consume cultural products. Hmm, theatres survived, but movie theatres are closing one after another, giving way to mostly super markets due to spaciousness. An international trend has recently made its appearance in our country and it is none other than local film festivals. One of the protagonists, Babis Tsoutsias, moves between Patmos, Spetses and Paros, presenting films, some of them first-run, to a cosmopolitan audience thirsty for Art during the holidays.

We talk to the Greek-born, but Stockholm-based, TV presenter Alexandra Paschalidou about the film “100 seasons”, which was screened at the premiere of the event. She liked it a lot, perhaps because it was Swedish, but the interest of the case lies elsewhere. That during the 10 days of the Aegean Film Festival we are not only concerned with which beach to swim in or which tavern to cheer up in, but we enrich our daily lives with high quality spiritual food. I was pleased to learn that the 1st Anafi Film Festival took place at the beginning of July, while in Kastellorizo, for the past 7 years, the “Beyond Borders” International Documentary Festival is also being organised at the end of August. From 28 December 1895, when the first public cinema screening was held by Auguste and Louis Lumiere in Paris, until 25 July this year, when Giulia Amati’s documentary about the only pupil of the school of Arkios, “Kristos, the last child”, was screened on Patmos, Cinema seems not to have said its last word.