The boundaries between these two genres [fiction and documentary] are porous. One must feel a documentaristic texture in fiction and create characters in documentaries. – Agnès Varda It’s at once deceiving and heartening to attend a film festival in a gloriously beautiful place that appears to be thriving, not only with arts and culture galore, but what appears to be a robust consumer culture as well — plenty of high-end shops, bars, restaurants and clubs filled to capacity. Especially when the sun goes down, in typical Balkan fashion, everyone comes out to promenade, eat, smoke, drink and debate until the […]

I’m covering the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for Filmmaker right now, and some images from the March documentary event seem prescient in the light of the hour-by-hour unfolding of events in Greece, where the fall of a government could affect all of Europe, the world economy, and by extension, filmmaking everywhere. Here are some of my photos.     Thessaloniki is a palimpsest, a city written upon other cities, incarnation atop incarnation. The history of this far northern Greek city since first dredged from the sea by Alexander the Great has been one of fall and rise, of fire and […]