The Hindered Drive toward Internationalisation: Thessaloniki (International) Film Festival

Originally a site for the promotion of the Greek film production, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, founded in 1960, gradually evolved to showcase international cinema, with a special emphasis on Balkan film. By focusing on the festival’s international aspirations, this account highlights certain under-researched parts of its history during which the festival offered parallel, competitive or not, programs of non-Greek films. In exploring this history, this article foregrounds tensions among key stakeholders, and maps these over the country’s broader sociopolitical dynamics, as well as in relation to broader developments in the European and international film festival scene

The absent father of Sino-French cinema: contemporary Taiwanese cinema and 1950s French auteurs

In contemporary Sino-French cinema, father characters who are dead, long lost or geographically distant leave gaping holes in the lives of the offspring left behind. The absent fathers in Sino-French films by Taiwanese auteurs Cheng Yu-chieh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang serve as metaphors for French auteurs. French New Wave films constitute the majority of the intertexts; however, early 1950s French cinema and even late nineteenth-century painting reflect the expansiveness of French influence. Despite the possibility of an orientalist dynamic, Taiwanese auteurs not only pay homage to their French 'fathers', and especially New Waver Franc¸ois Truffaut, but also strike out on their own, contributing innovative work to contemporary transnational cinemas