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Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Fronts Queer Cinema, Flies Flag for Greece’s LGBTQ Community After Historic Same-Sex Marriage Law


The Greek documentary festival will fete diversity and inclusion as the country's queer community celebrates the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Taking place just weeks after the historic passage of a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Greece, the 26th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival — which runs March 7 – 17 — pays tribute to that watershed moment in the long-running fight for equal rights for the country’s LGBTQ community, while also issuing a rallying cry for diversity, inclusion and empowerment across the globe. The festival begins March 7 with “ They Shot the Piano Player,” a hybrid, hand-drawn animated documentary from Oscar-nominated Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that focuses on the disappearance of Brazilian jazz pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior in Argentina in the ’70s. Among the highlights from the international competition are Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’ Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “ A New Kind of Wilderness,” which follows a family coping with loss after trying to escape civilization to live in the woods of Norway; Ramona S. Diaz’s “ And So It Begins,” which documents the 2022 presidential election in the Philippines, and Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta’s “Nocturnes,” about the secret nocturnal universe of the Eastern Himalayas, both coming off of Sundance premieres; and Farahnaz Sharifi’s intimate family portrait of life during Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, “ My Stolen Planet,” which took a second-place Audience Award after premiering in the Berlinale’s Panorama strand.

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