Award-winning short films from the Athens International Film Festival are now available on the Onassis Foundation's digital channel

This time, 22 awarded short films from the Drama International Short Film Festival and the Athens International Film Festival premiere on the Onassis Channel on YouTube and onassis.org. From October 16 and for the next ten days, we tune in online to experience feelings that can fit into a few minutes.

Twenty-two award-winning Greek short films come to usher you into their big worlds, available to watch on your own screens, with company or on your own, as loud as you want, whenever you want. For the fifth consecutive year, the Onassis Foundation renews its collaboration with the Drama International Short Film Festival and the Athens International Film Festival. Topics such as human relationships, childhood, the multifaceted forms of violence, coming-of-age, or life in rural Greece, among many other issues, hold a mirror against our faces, prompting us to revisit what is happening in our inner and outer worlds.

A film that blends its materials in surprising and daring ways, one that creates a hybrid yet entirely personal universe connecting metaphysical enlightenment with the light captured on film, loudly shouts: “Yes, cinema is our place of worship” (“Light of Light”). Faith, religions, their political imposition, hypocrisy, and man as a small, insignificant, suffering being, captive of his own devices (“Unorthodox”). An entirely personal universe; epic yet tiny; cerebral yet emotional (“Midnight Skin”).

The audience will relate to some highly empathetic characters, crave to follow them on their journey, and agonize over their fate. A fragmentary fictional biopic of Kafka, who writes incessantly, masturbates, and dies – and in this process of his, we discover a piece of ourselves (“Kafka's Collection of Porn”). When the time comes, love will find you wherever you are, shattering all certainties (“Crossing”). An angry teen explores her desire for male attention with two older boys, ignoring her need for a father figure (“Days of a Lilac Summer”). The wild heart of a child who cannot come to terms with the irreconcilability of death (“Angry Fish”). A woman’s daily struggle for survival in the modern urban environment (“Aerolin”). Love will always emerge as the ultimate affirmation of life and hope (“Buffer Zone”). Moments experienced for the very first time; a moment of change (“The First Setting Sun of Summer”). Identity and the alteration of people over the age of 30, away from norms and stereotypes, the frustration and compromise of an entire generation (“Arizones”).

Friendship at a pivotal coming-of-age moment and the meaning of having someone by your side, through thick and thin, and to grow together and separately (“Good Girls Club: A Virginity Odyssey”). A day in the life of a group of high school students, who decide not to attend the annual military parade on the national holiday, and instead escape the harsh reality of national upliftment to immerse themselves in the safety of “one-for-the-other” (“The Parade”). An essay film that explores the body of the Athenian metropolis in search of traces of significant conflict events in contemporary political history (“Athens, My Love”). A series of obstacles crop up in the harsh everyday life of a man who chases his dream (“Greenhouse”).

The true “taste” of life, in which joy alternates with denial every single moment taking nothing for granted; and the way our societies treat the elderly, refusing to age, glorifying novelty and youth, at the expense of the traces of time and – ultimately – of life itself (“Τhe Armchair on the Pavement”). Breakup is the biggest of all the tiny problems in this world (“Super”). Our boundaries that breathe with us, from a chance encounter with an Otherness to an intersection, to the change of the already known, to the opening of a new world (“Achinos”). An autobiographical film that brims with desire (“A Diary of Sexual Solitude”). Light exists in the heart of darkness and love can emerge even in the darkest moments (“The Chaos She Left Behind”). A gangster film about the underworld (“Little Doggie”). Two persons meet, interact, attract one another, collide, but defend the same value: Liberty (“A Piece of Liberty”).

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Available online from Wednesday, October 16 at 12:00, to Saturday, October 26 at 23:59