Yiorgos Stamboulopoulos

Yiorgos Stamboulopoulos was born in Athens in 1936. Between 1956 and 1966, he worked as a first assistant director or production manager for more than fifty Greek films of foreign productions shot in Greece. The filming of his first feature film, “Open Letter,” was shadowed by the rise of the dictatorship in April 1967. He managed to illegally export the film, which was screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 1968 and received the FIPRESCI Prize, yet the following year it was banned by the dictatorship committee of the Thessaloniki Festival of Greek Cinema. During the dictatorship, he abandoned any form of creative cinematographic activity and started working in advertising as a producer and director, making over 1,000 advertisements between 1968 and 1984. During the period 1980-1991, he made three feature films—“Kai xana pros ti doxa trava (Marching on to Glory),” “Caution, Danger!”, “Two Suns in the Sky”—and some television films for state and private media. After fifteen years of absence, in 2006 he made his last film, “Pandora.”