The 32nd Athens International Film Festival announces Its Strategic Partnership with DEI and Unveils Its Official Poster

The 32nd Athens International Film Festival announces the launch of its partnership with DEI as Gold Sponsor. Through this collaboration, DEI highlights cinema as a field of inspiration, technological innovation, and sustainable progress, while also bringing the seventh art closer to audiences, inviting them to experience a unique cultural and cinematic event.

With the support of DEI, the 32nd Athens International Film Festival returns with a rich programme of screenings and events, transforming Athens into one great cinematic celebration. With a steadfast belief in the power of art to inspire, unite, and drive change, DEI continues to stand firmly #withCulture, energizing everything that helps shape a better future.

THE POSTER | Through the Looking Glass

The 32nd Athens International Film Festival – Opening Nights is delighted to present this year’s visual identity, comprising five alternative versions that become reflections, multiple images.

Creative Rationale by visual communication designer Vassilis Mexis:

“This year’s Festival identity presents a series of compositions that represent the cinematic experience, the act of looking. Glass, like the screen, is a surface for projection. We look through this ‘window’ to see a better reality, one as we dream it. In a world that is gradually losing its uniqueness, the Festival becomes the medium through which we define ourselves and, by extension, our culture.

The words OPENING NIGHTS, rendered in large glass letters, stand like a transparent mirror between us and the reflection that is slowly beginning to take shape—a figure not yet complete, which we encounter at the very moment it acquires form before our eyes. The blurred, almost undefined form behind the glass is every work of art onto which the viewer ‘projects’ their own desires, their own fantasies. The work inevitably becomes our reflection.

Looking through the Festival’s ‘glass mirror’, we do not see a distorting illusion, but rather bridge the gap between who we are and what we desire. And when we know who we are, we immediately know what kind of world we want.”

Vassilis Mexis is a designer, illustrator and Creative Art Director with a strong and distinctive presence in the fields of Greek advertising and cultural institutions. He began his professional career in advertising in 2012, contributing to acclaimed campaigns. At the same time, he has been the designer behind the visual identity and posters of the Athens Open Air Film Festival powered by DEI and the Athens International Film Festival from 2016 to the present. His participation in group design exhibitions, as well as his work on film posters, book covers and magazine covers, has been extensively featured in both print and digital media. His work has received recognition through distinctions and awards in international and domestic competitions.

#aiff32

The 32nd Athens International Film Festival will take place from September 30 through October 11, 2026.

The PRESS CONFERENCE for the 32nd edition will take place on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. at the Theo Angelopoulos Auditorium of the French Institute of Greece.