The Athens International Film Festival presents the tribute "David Lynch: The Complete Filmography"

DAVID LYNCH 
THE COMPLETE FILMOGRAPHY

"The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is"
David Lynch

The tribute under the title DAVID LYNCH: THE COMPLETE FILMOGRAPHY takes over after the three-day marathon screenings at the Onassis Stegi that was completed yesterday with great success and, in collaboration with the Onassis Stegi, carries forward and spreads in two cinemas the great Athenian celebration in honour of this unique personality of world cinema.

The tribute will take place from the 14th until the 24th of February at ATHINAION 1 and CINOBO OPERA 1 and is a minimum respect paid to one of the great heroes of the Athens International Film Festival, an unprecedented and seismic figure of an artist who passed away on the 15th of January at the age of 78, leaving behind an indelible mark on contemporary culture and our lives.

During the tribute, the audience will have the opportunity to watch all 10 feature films of David Lynch's filmography. Eight of these films will be screened by the Athens International Film Festival in the dazzling 4K digital restoration for which the director himself collaborated and gave his consent, while on February the 24th, a date which fans all over the world celebrate as Twin Peaks Day, TWIN PEAKS INTERNATIONAL PILOT will be screened for the first time in our country, the Lynch-directed, two-hour, extended and with alternative finale pilot of the series that forever changed the television landscape.

The screenings will be introduced by beloved members of the film and cultural community.

THE FILMS OF THE TRIBUTE

ERASERHEAD (1977)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Jack Nance, Charoltte Stewart, Allen Joseph | Duration: 89'

It took six years to complete and once it was released it soon became the ultimate midnight cult movie. It couldn't have happened any other way. Impossible to describe, David Lynch's expressionistic debut is not just a film but a haunting experience. Through a dive into the existential nightmare of a man surrounded by an eerie industrial setting and confronted with adult anxieties, Lynch not only offers cinema its first pure surreal creation, but also introduces the audience to an unprecedented universe that is awe-inspiring primarily because it communicates exclusively through the language and logic of dreams. Loukas Katsikas

THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud | Duration: 124'

An artistic and box-office triumph that rendered Lynch's name a conscience to a wider audience and helped him achieve worldwide acclaim, “The Elephant Man”, nominated for 8 Academy Awards, tells the true story of John Merrick: a horribly disfigured man from birth (performed stunningly by John Hurt, behind heavy and painful makeup), who lives a sad short life in a Victorian England that brutally treats his difference. Moving in a way that is hard to resist, Lynch's first mainstream creation reveals an emotional and highly humanistic side that the director would only sporadically reveal in his films from then on, while taking the viewer on an unforgettable journey that begins with revulsion and clinical curiosity to culminate in compassion, understanding and love. Loukas Katsikas

DUNE (1984)
4K RESTORATION
Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, Virginia Madsen, Patrick Stewart, Francesca Annis, Max von Sydow, Dean Stockwell | Duration: 140'

A resounding failure in its day, but one that was to meet with many ardent supporters in the years to come, David Lynch's space opera attempted the impossible: to fit Frank Herbert's labyrinthine and voluminous literary epic and Paul Atreides' experiential intergalactic odyssey into the dimensions of a regular film, expensive in cost, impressive in size and spectacle, faithful to the book and uneven in sum. Filled with the director's wonderful eccentricities, performed by a terrific cast, and with memorable individual scenes, “Dune” remains one of cinema's biggest lost bets.Loukas Katsikas

BLUE VELVET (1986)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper | Duration: 120'

No one was prepared for the shock “Blue Velvet” caused when it was first released in movie theaters and no one ever recovered from it. A combination of modern noir and psychosexuall thriller, with a remarkable Dennis Hopper in the role of the villain and scenes that rightfully caused a sensation in their time, the masterpiece in Lynch's career remains one of the greatest and most radical creations of American cinema, ending up claiming the Oscar for Best Director – one of the most open-minded and progressive nominations ever. Loukas Katsikas

WILD AT HEART (1990)
DIGITAL RESTORATION
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini | Duration: 125'

A snakeskin jacket. A convertable car crossing the highway with the gas pedal pressed all the way down. A man singing "Love Me Tender", perched on the hood of a car. A woman "hotter than the tar of Georgia". And two pursued lovers who will have to travel countless miles before they manage to find a refuge for their love.

Made of genuine cinematic passion, Lynch's most paroxysmal creation fetishistically fuses romance, perversion, sex, violence, the fairy-tale "Wizard of Oz" and rock 'n' roll into a Molotov cocktail that the director lets explode on screen. But he does so with the relish of a playful saboteur who loves to trap a tale of love and lawlessness with landmines, in the same way he loves to follow his innocent heroes on the wild journey they take. Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Loukas Katsikas

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, Chris Isaak, Grace Zabriskie, David Bowie | Duration: 134'

If one were to go back in time to 1992, the year the film was first released, he would be shocked by the concerted negative and almost hostile reaction against it. Audiences flamboyingly turned their backs on it, critics were aggressive, the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival was accompanied by boos, and few seemed willing to forgive the director for such a nightmarish cinematic counterpart to their favorite television series. But here's the thing: as with most of Lynch's films, time has been fair with “Fire Walk With Me”: the film is now acknowledged as the hidden masterpiece in the director's filmography. And it is now more readily understood that the last seven days of Laura Palmer's life (the film is a prequel to TV's "Twin Peaks") not only gave heartbreaking voice to a heroine who never gained substance in the series, but also became a personal testimony of anguish and dizzying self-destruction, the shocking descent into an earthly hell of unspeakable horrors and traumas that lurk in proper human societies. An unforgettable performance by Sheryl Lee. Loukas Katsikas

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Robert Blake | Duration: 135'

Unjustly underrated in its time, today it is deservedly placed among Lynch's top creations. This demonic exercise of submission tells the bizarre story of a saxophonist who is imprisoned for the murder of his wife and one night in his cell he is mysteriously transformed into an unknown young man. The director requests from his viewers to greet this narrative paradox and decode on their own the enigmas of the plot of a disguised horror film that achieves to recreate in cinematic (and utterly fascinating) terms a situation taken from the pages of psychoanalysis books. Loukas Katsikas

THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Richard Fransworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton, Everett McGill | Duration: 112'

The most unexpected and emotionally generous milestone of David Lynch's career remains the starkest testament to his artistic range as a director. Far from the nightmarish visions of most of his creations, Lynch makes a film in which the discovery of a 73-year-old man embarking on a multi-mile journey, mounted on a lawn mower, is the singular paradox. Based on true events, "Straight Story" sends its smiling elderly hero on a nearly impossible six-week, 500-mile odyssey to meet and reconcile with the brother he hasn't seen in years. His journey becomes a lyrical voyage into the heart of the American heartland, into an anachronistic America of lost innocence, lonely country roads, open horizons, and a universal world of love that for once seems to be made only for the Good. A wonderful leading man in the film, Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Loukas Katsikas

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH 
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justine Theroux, Ann Miller | Duration: 147'

With a Best Director award from Cannes Film Festival and a same nomination at the Oscars, the most important film of the 21st century so far (according to the majority of the film critics worldwide) wanders in the shadow of Hollywood, nightcrawling in Los Angeles, in the company of two women that are trying to solve a mystery. Identities are changing, characters are disintegrated, the story breaks down and is rebuilt to reveal hell itself in a world where people exist only as puppets, the truth is fabricated and love is yet another orchestrated lie. The dream is suddenly transformed into a nightmare. And the rest become silence. Silencio! Loukas Katsikas

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
4K RESTORATION SUPERVISED AND APPROVED BY DAVID LYNCH
Starring: Laura Dern, Justine Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Julia Ormond, Grace Zabriskie | Duration: 180'

Sixty years old when he was making his last film - now completely independent - and artistically freer than ever, David Lynch is on an imaginary cycle that takes him back in an experimental and innovative mood to his cinematic beginnings, “Eraserhead”. And all of this takes place through the story of an actress who is dangerously identified with the heroine she takes on to play in a film, though nothing can sum up this three-hour rollercoaster maze inside a (stunning) Laura Dern who wanders as Alice in a network of dreams, fears and ghosts of the mind. Aggressive and rough in form, as if telegraphing images from a dark and invisible land deeply rooted in the mind and subconscious, "Inland Empire" can be seen as an allegory for the haunting powers of storytelling and for the schizophrenic and painful existential experience that is acting, if you decide to treat it as a risky dive into (your) Unknown. Loukas Katsikas

TWIN PEAKS INTERNATIONAL PILOT (1990)
DIGITAL RESTORATION
Starring: Kyle Maclachlan, Michael Ontkean, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Wise, James Marshall, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sheryl Lee | Duration: 113'

Before the legendary series began airing on television, this was the two-hour introduction to the dark and mysterious universe of Twin Peaks. Lynch filmed it as a pilot for the mystery series he wanted to make. But he considered treating it as a proper film, with a beginning, middle and (open) ending, and in case the series didn't get approval, showing it as a standalone creation on the small screen, although in some European countries it was given standard theatrical distribution. The pilot, however, was met with huge ratings, the series was automatically approved, and the rest is History. Yet what you see here, and which will be shown for the first time in Greece, is a treasure for fans of the series and the director. It has a longer running time and a different finale than the original pilot we know, gives an alternative explanation to the mystery, identifies the killer without being objectively the one the series would later reveal to us, and is completed in a dreamy conclusion that later became a trademark of TV's Twin Peaks. Loukas Katsikas

The screening of the film coincides with the global celebration of Twin Peaks Day.

INFORMATION
The film theaters that will host the tribute are:
ATHINAION 1 (124 Vasilissis Sofias Ave.) and CINOBO OPERA 1 (57 Akadimias Str.).

PROGRAM | FEBRUARY 2025
Friday 14th | WILD AT HEART | ATHINAION 1 | 22:45
Saturday 15th | LOST HIGHWAY | ATHINAION 1 | 22:45
Sunday 16th | THE ELEPHANT MAN | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15
Monday 17th | ERASERHEAD | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15
Tuesday 18th | THE STRAIGHT STORY | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15
Wednesday 19th | DUNE | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15
Thursday 20th | TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15
Friday 21st | MULHOLLAND DRIVE | ATHINAION 1 | 22:45
Saturday 22nd | BLUE VELVET | ATHINAION 1 | 22:45
Sunday 23rd | INLAND EMPIRE | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 21:00
Monday 24th : Twin Peaks Day | TWIN PEAKS INTERNATIONAL PILOT | CINOBO OPERA 1 | 22:15

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