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Three Onassis documentaries at the Athens International Film Festival 2021

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“Girlhood,” “Clean Cities,” “Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens.” The Onassis Culture documentaries reach their audience at the leading film festival in Athens.

The fragile coming-of-age reality (“Girlhood,” 2021), the female migration at cities across the globe (“Clean Cities,” 2021), the lives of the anonymous people who worked at the building industry (“Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens,” 2021). Through the Onassis Documentaries everyday heroes and heroines raise their voices and position themselves on issues of ‘here and now.’ Thanks to the power of images and the truth that the documentary genre brings forth, we can travel, feel, challenge, and ultimately come closer to our own reality and the world we choose to live in.

Discover the films screened at the 27th Athens International Film Festival 2021

Still from the "Girlhood" film

“Girlhood” directed by Vania Turner and Maria Sidiropoulou
Wednesday, September 29, 17:30 | Ideal

“Girlhood” follows Vera, Christina and Nefeli, three seventeen-year-old girls in Athens who come of age during the pandemic. From the first frame, we’re invited into their worlds as they talk about their frustrations and dreams. These intimate, sometimes painful conversations are threaded with the Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok videos shaping their self-image in quarantine.

Still: Marina Danezi

“Clean Cities” directed by Marina Danezi, Kostas Mandilas, Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou, and Christos Sarris
Friday, October 1st, 18:30 | Trianon

Who cleans the world’s cities? And why are they mainly women and immigrants? Onassis Stegi’s well-traveled production “Clean City” has prompted a hybrid film. Four different directors follow the work as it tours four cities: Skopje, Sarajevo, Montpellier, and Istanbul. Female immigrants and cleaners – the work’s lead performers, and other women too – tell their life stories, and talk about the prejudice inherent in notions of cleanliness and purity, and the dangers of fascism, about women’s migration, and sexual assault. An anthology film on the border between documentary and fiction that springs from the filmed theater production by Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris.

“Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens” directed by Tassos Langis and Yiannis Gaitanidis
Sunday, September 26, 18:30 | Trianon
Friday, October 1st, 19:45 | Greek Film Archive (Tainiothiki / Lais)

Who were those people from the countryside who came to Athens with their wives after the Civil War and ‘cemented’ the city? Who ‘demolished’ the neoclassical buildings and why did they fill the Attica Basin with apartment buildings?How did they learn and develop their craft, where did they come from, what techniques and knowledge did they carry with them? How did they reinvent their tools to satisfy emerging needs? How did they communicate and negotiate with the ‘educated’ architects? What were their wives asking for? In other words, what was the story of their encounter with the ‘project of modernity’? As long as these ‘co-authors’ remain invisible, the history of modern Athens is still incomplete, if not also deeply deceptive. This documentary is based on the same-titled book by Ioanna Theocharopoulou, revised and published in 2021 by the Onassis Foundation.

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