Grigoris Vardarinos

Grigoris Vardarinos is a director. He holds an MA in Film Directing from Edinburgh College of Art (2009), for which he received a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation.

His MA thesis short film “Talking Piranhas” was nominated for the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award 2010 in Fiction, and received the 2011 Golden Panda Award for Most Innovative Film at Sichuan Film Festival, China. Co-produced by the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ΕRΤ) and COSMOTE TV, his short film “The Noir Project” (2014) was supported by the program MEDIA–SEE Cinema Network. Selected in tens of international film festivals in Greece and abroad, it received numerous awards and formed the core of an educational program in Greek schools about gender equality and women’s rights.

He has written and directed four creative documentaries for ERT (“Mehmet” 2010, “Krito the Acrobat” 2013, "In Wood We Trust" 2015, "Boys & Ballet" 2018). He co-created the award winning documentary series of ERT3 “Herbs: Fruit of the Earth” (2017). In 2017 he finished his first feature-length documentary “The Great Fire of Salonica: Birth of a City”. Co-produced by Cosmote History and supported by the Thessaloniki International Exhibition – HELEXPO – and Thessaloniki Port Authority SA, it was screened throughout Greece with great success and received several awards in film festivals.

He has created a mini series of six historical documentaries about the 200-year anniversary of the Greek Revolution, co-produced by Cosmote History. He has been working on the script of his first feature film through a relevant program of the Greek Film Centre. He is particularly keen in collaborating with children and teenagers. His is interested in the intersection of art and society and they ways in which they interact and affect each other.