31st ΑTHENS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL GUESTS

Yorgos Mavropsaridis ACE,BFE,GFE / Masterclass The Invisible Art of Editing

Yorgos Mavropsaridis' work has been honored with numerous awards, including two Oscar nominations for the films The Favorite and Poor Things, two BAFTA nominations, the ACE Eddie Award for The Favourite, and the European Film Academy's Best Editor Award. Yorgos Mavropsaridis is one of the most innovative film editors of his generation, recognized for his distinctive style, rhythmic precision, and ability to create tension and a unique sense of humor through editing. He is a key figure in European cinema and is best known for his long-standing collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, having edited all of his fiction films – from Kineta (2005) to the recent Kinds of Kindness (2024). His award-winning work includes films such as Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018), and Poor Things (2023), Monos (2019), Chevalier (2015), Park (2016), and She Will (2021). Through his bold and narrative editing, Mavropsaridis has not only shaped some of the most distinctive films of the last two decades, but continues to inspire a new generation of editors and filmmakers worldwide.

French Institute of Greece 4/10 at 12:00

Neil Jordan / Lifetime Achievement Award

Neil Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and author. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. Jordan’s films include Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy and Interview with the Vampire. They have won him numerous awards, from an Oscar, to BAFTAS and Golden Lions at the Venice Film Festival.

Olympia Municipal Musical Theatre “Maria Callas” 10/10 at 18:00

Damien Jalet / Masterclass Choreographing the frame

French Belgian choreographer and dancer, Damien Jalet's work moves from major international collaborations to more personal projects. His works which are often collaborative testify to the power of dance to constantly reinvent itself in dialogue with other disciplines such as the visual arts, music, cinema and fashion. He danced and choreographed for such diverse international companies, and worked and created with such various artists as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Marina Abramović, Kohei Nawa, Arthur Nauzyciel, Paul Thomas Anderson, Madonna, JR, Thomas Bangalter, Jacques Audiard or Xavier Dolan among others. In recognition of his contribution to the arts, Damien Jalet was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2022.

French Institute of Greece 7/10 at 12:00

Scott Gracheff / How Dark My Love

Scott Gracheff is a Multi-Emmy Award-Winning Director-Producer with over 25 years' experience in Film/TV production. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he learned filmmaking at an early age and still owns his coveted Chinon 200/8XL Super 8mm camera (and it still works too!). He cut his teeth in the trenches of PBS before moving to NYC in 2009. His documentary directing work includes,THE RUGBY PLAYER, winner of multiple festival awards including the HBO Audience Award for Best Documentary from The Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The film tells the story of Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on Flight 93 on 9/11, and his mother, Alice Hoagland, a former United flight attendant. SOLDADOS aired along with THE WAR, Ken Burn's landmark PBS series about WWII. The documentary highlights the experience of Latino WWII soldiers, and received a 2008 Emmy Award Nomination. The award-winningDAVE TATSUNO: MOVIES AND MEMORIES uncovers the story of a man who smuggled his 8mm film camera into a Japanese internment camp and secretly filmed his family's 3-year life behind barbed wire. RETURN TO THE VALLEY explores the Japanese American experience after WWII and won a 2004 Emmy Award.Scott was a co-producer on OUT IN THE NIGHT which examines an incident where four young women were violently threatened on the street, defended themselves and were then convicted in the court and media as a "gang of killer lesbians". The film won numerous festival Jury and Audience awards and was featured on the PBS series P.O.V

ASTY | 8/10 at 21:30
ASTOR | 9/10 at 19:30

Joe Coleman / How Dark My Love

Joe Coleman is an internationally recognized painter, writer and performer who has been exhibiting in major institutions internationally for four decades, including solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunst-Werke Institute forContemporary Art, Berlin; Barbican Centre, London; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford. Coleman was featured in the Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian collaborative exhibitionUnrealism in Miami and more recently Luncheon on the Grass at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles in 2022. He is represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York. Coleman’s performance work from the 1980s was some of the most radical of its time, and is documented in films and books about the period. He is the subject of several monographs including A Doorway to Joe, the largest tome to date of the artist’s work and life, published by Fantagraphic Books last year. An avid and passionate collector, Coleman’s “Odditorium” is a private museum where sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts, and works of religious devotion live together to form a dark mirror that reflects an alternative side of the American psyche.The collection has been published in numerous books, prints, and records. Joe Coleman is the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, REST IN PIECES: A PORTRAIT OF JOE COLEMAN (1997). He has appeared in acting roles in films such as Asia Argento’s SCARLET DIVA (2000) and as himself in the “Lower East Side” episode of Anthony Bourdain: PartsUnknown (2018). A new documentary film on Coleman and his wife Whitney Ward titled HOW DARK MY LOVE will have a film festival premiere in 2025. Coleman lives with his wife, muse and long-time partner Whitney Ward in New York.

ASTY | 8/10 at 21:30
ASTOR | 9/10 at 19:30

Whitney Ward / How Dark My Love

Whitney Ward is a photographer and artist. Raised in South Florida, she moved to New York in the 1980s, after obtaining a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and began to immerse herself in and document the underground arts scene in her photographs, moving between rock shows and burlesque performances. She has shot album covers and directed music videos for bands, including Nashville Pussy and Cosmic Psychos,and befriended gutter-punk icon GG Allin, shooting one of the last images of him alive, which was published in Spin Magazine. For much of her time in New York, Ward has been deeply involved with the burlesque community, and has participated in the Coney Island MermaidParade for over 30 years, becoming known for costumes that are more outrageous and elaborate every year.
In  2000, she married Joe Coleman at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore in a ceremony presided over by a ventriloquist dummy named Dutch. As Coleman’s muse, she appears in many of his paintings that depict their life together, and is the subject of one of his major works, A Doorway to Whitney, an intensely detailed life-size portrait that took Coleman over 4 years to complete. In 2024, Coleman and Ward were appointed King and Queen of the Mermaid Parade, and led the procession through Coney Island in their chariot. Ward's photographs and past costumes from the Mermaid Parade are currently on show as part of the Carnival exhibition curated by Joe Coleman, for Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York.

ASTY | 8/10 at 21:30
ASTOR | 9/10 at 19:30

Asia Argento / How Dark My Love

Asia Argento is an Italian actress and filmmaker. The daughter of filmmaker Dario Argento, she has had roles in several of her father's features and achieved mainstream success with appearances in XXX (2002), Land of the Dead (2005), and Marie Antoinette (2006). Her other notable acting credits include Queen Margot (1994), Let's Not Keep in Touch (1994), Traveling Companion (1996), Last Days (2005), and Islands (2011). Argento is the recipient of several accolades, including two David di Donatello awards for Best Actress and three Italian Golden Globes. Her directorial credits include Scarlet Diva (2000), The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) and Misunderstood (2014).

ASTY | 8/10 at 21:30
ASTOR | 9/10 at 19:30

Josh & Jason Diamond / How Dark My Love

The Diamond Bros have produced and directed numerous award-winning feature films and documentaries that have screened internationally with world premieres at such festivals as SXSW, TriBeca and Berlinale and aired on Streamers. They also won a Primetime Emmy in2018 for producing "Get That Wand" a season opening special for SesameStreet/HBO. Feature film and documentary work includes: Executive Producers on THE EXPLODING GIRL (Narrative Feature) World Premiere Berlinale, Best actress, Zoe Kazan, at Tribeca Film Festival, Distributed by Oscilloscope; Executive Producers on BITTERROOT - (Narrative Feature), World Premiere Tribeca Film Festival, still on Festival Circuit 2024/25. Special Jury Mention Award for Cinematography in a U.S. Feature at the 2024 Tribeca FilmFestival; Director/Producers on DANKO JONES - BRING ON THE MOUNTAIN (Feature Documentary) Sold Direct by Artist Label. Accompanying Narrative Short film (starring the band) World Premiere Raindance Film Festival in UK; Producers on MADE IN JAPAN(FeatureDocumentary), World Premiere SXSW, Available on Prime Video and streamers. Nashville Film Festival Audience Award; Producers on THE DWARVENAUT (Feature Documentary), World Premiere SXSW, Available on Prime Video and streamers; Producers on INDIGOBLUE (Short Film) for NEON, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2025; Producers on Untitled Frightened Rabbit Film (Feature Documentary), In Production/Post with BBC Scotland.

ASTY | 8/10 at 21:30
ASTOR | 9/10 at 19:30

Sepideh Farsi / Put your soul in your hand and walk

Iranian director Sepideh Farsi experienced the revolution at 13, was imprisoned at 16 as a dissident, and left her native Iran at 18. Based in Paris since then, she has studied mathematics, taken photos, and made some fifteen films — documentaries, fiction, and animation — among which Tehran Without Authorization (Locarno), Red Rose (TIFF), and The Siren, a feature animation that deals with the Iran-Iraq war, which was the opening film of Berlinale Panorama and has won numerous awards since. She is currently working on an “Iranian Western” film project, and also developing an animation project inspired by her life, called Memoirs of an Undutiful Girl, all the while fighting for the instauration of democracy in Iran.

ASTOR | 7/10 at 19:30
ASTOR | 8/10 at 22:00