Get ready! This is the full program of the 8th Athens Open Air Film Festival

The beloved film-loving summer date, the Athens Open Air Film Festival, in collaboration with the City of Athens Cultural, Sport and Youth Organization, returns in its 8th edition with magical screenings from June to August. Special city corners, archaeological monuments, parks, squares, beaches and some of the most beautiful museums and sites in Athens transform into an open-air cinema with free entrance to the audience.

Note by the Artistic Director of the Athens Open Air Film Festival, Loukas Katsikas:

«The Athens Open Air Film Festival is a gesture of love towards cinema and our city. An alternative and disarmingly beautiful way to watch films, while on the same time an opportunity to face Athens like you have never seen or imagined it before. A kind of cultural tourism aiming to introduce to the capital’s visitors and residents a side of the city which is as much unexpected and photogenic as it is incurably film-loving.

This year, faithful to its philosophy and its preferences, the 8th Athens Open Air Film Festival will host a program of 18 classic films, many of which constitute remarkable literary adaptations serving the big screen. For the whole summer, and with free entrance, it will visit museums and squares, gardens and pedestrian precincts, archaeological monuments and parks. It will climb the Lycabettus Hill, maintaining a tradition which was the first to start three years ago. It will lay its mat on the beach of Agios Kosmas, right next to the sea. And on Saturday, June 30th it will make history by realizing the first film screening at the Little Theater of Ancient Epidaurus - an event of great significance worth watching. The only thing left to do is to secure your seat in time for the screenings you wish to watch. And wish for a beautiful summer in the wonderful open-air cinema which for the 8th year we call Athens».  

The detailed program:

JUNE

MONDAY, JUNE 4th / Byzantine and Christian Museum
Opening Film
Duration: 135’ | Starting Time: 21h30

With the support of the U.S. Embassy in Athens
Click here  for more information on the Opening Film

FRIDAY, JUNE 8th / Avdi Square
The Crying Game, 1992 by Neil Jordan

Screening within the Athens Pride framework, in collaboration with the Athens & Epidaurus Festival and the Animasyros - International Animation Festival + Agora.

Awarded with an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, one of the 90s top films tells the story of an IRA repentant perpetrator who finds unexpected redemption and unusual love in the face of one of his victim's lover. However, nothing is that simple in the cunning film web weaved by the great Irish director («Mona Lisa», «The End of the Affair») who combines genres such as political thriller, modern noir and romantic drama into a complex and full of twists contemplation on the mysterious nature of human sexuality and morality and the peculiar games of fate and life.

Starring: Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, Forest Whitaker, Jim Broadbent
Duration: 111’ | Starting Time: 21h30

FRIDAY, JUNE 15th / Plato’s Academy

Goldfinger, 1964 by Guy Hamilton

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council

The uncomparable combination of cosmopolitan adventure, spy action and witty screenplay. Sean Connery as more irresistible a James Bond as ever. Shirley Bassey and her prominent voice in the theme song. Humour which becomes a necessary addition to an on-screen cocktail that is always served «shaken, not stirred»… It is regarded, by many, as the British agent’s top film adventure.

Starring: Sean Connery, Gert Fröbe, Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton, Bernard Lee
Duration: 110’ |  Starting Time: 21h30

THURSDAY, JUNE 21st / Ermou Pedestrian Precinct
Strictly Ballroom, 1992 by Baz Luhrmann

European Music Day Celebration

The young dancer Scott Hastings trains from a young age in ballroom dances, something that is a family tradition. Being faithful to a totally unique personal style, he does his best to win the big prize in the national competition. A director who loves music, grand spectacle and who functions without guilt towards the pop culture’s bliss and film melodrama, Luhrmann delivers in his cinema debut an indulging dance lesson.

Starring: Paul Mercurio, Tara Morice, Bill Hunter, Pat Thompson, Gia Carides, Peter Whitford
Duration: 94’ | Starting Time: 21h30

MONDAY, JUNE 25th / Cine Riviera
THE YOUNG RUNAWAY, 1968 by Stavros Tsiolis

Anniversary screening-tribute to Stavros Tsiolis’ 50 years of contribution to the Greek cinema, in collaboration with the Lost Highway of Greek Cinema

The young Alexis, who just run away from the juvenile center, finds refuge in the basement of the even younger Maria. Behind the grown-ups’ back, and with the help of the other kids in the neighborhood, the two children will experience a short but also dangerous fairytale. At the same time an on-tour acting troupe comes by to offer the solution…Stavros Tsiolis’ first film is the declaration of his rare temperament. A sui generis film, from an equally unique maker, who saw in the heart of a typical melodrama the agitation of a (stolen) fast car’s engine.

Starring: Maria Papaioannou, Nikos Oikonomidis, Aggelos Antonopoulos, Ina Mauer, Maria Foka, Theano Ioannidou
Duration: 92’ | Starting Time: 21h30

SATURDAY, JUNE 30th / Little Theater of Ancient Epidaurus
FIRST FILM SCREENING in EPIDAURUS

Electra, 1962 by Michael Cacoyannis

In collaboration with the Athens & Epidaurus Festival

Michael Cacoyannis delivers the most timely and simultaneously exemplary transfer of ancient greek tragedy to cinema.

Eugene Ionesco glorified the film in «Le Figaro» by putting it down as the most beautiful film he has ever watched, the Cannes Film Festival established the Best Cinematic Transposition Award, in order to honour it, while the 24 added International Awards and the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, seal the quality of a film that does not merely constitute the cinematic version of a theatrical play, but transfigures tragedy into cinematic atonement.

Starring: Irene Pappa, Giannis Fertis, Aleka Katshelli, Manos Katrakis, Notis Peryalis, Takis Emmanuel
Music by: Mikis Theodorakis
Duration: 110’ | Starting Time: 21h30

JULY

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4th / French School at Athens
Three Colors: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu, 1993) by Krzysztof Kieślowski

Screening in collaboration with the Plein Air Festival of the French Institute

Julie’s husband Patrice – a famous music composer – and their little daughter, Anna, die in a car crush. Faced with this immense loss, she tries to make a new start and chooses loneliness. No matter the cost. Even if it means sacrificing her great love for music. When a music critic suspects she is behind her husband’s scores, Julie denies any part of the past that might threaten her newly found freedom.

Julie’s return to life becomes in the hands of the great Polish director a cinema tale which gradually incarnates the grief of loneliness into a divine praise for love.

Starring: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Régent, Emmanuelle Riva, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Véry
Duration: 98’ | Starting Time: 21h30

FRIDAY, JULY 6th / Cine Riviera
The Sleeping Car Murders (Compartiment Tueurs, 1965) by Costas Gavras

Screening in collaboration with the Lost Highway of Greek Cinema

On a night train from Marseilles to Paris, six passengers share the same cabin, but at the end of the journey one of them will be found dead in her bunk. The case is assigned to the Parisian police to solve, but the mystery grows bigger as the fellow passengers of the victim wind up, the one after the other, also dead.

Influenced by Jean Pierre Melville’s devout noir cinema and with a remarkable cast, Costas Gavras’ directorial debut enlivens in the big screen screen Sébastien Japrisot’s first mystery novel, a writer who would soon become renowned in the French crime fiction.  

Starring: Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Catherine Allégret, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michel Piccoli
Duration: 95’ | Starting Time 21h30

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11th / City of Athens Technopolis
The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001 by Wes Anderson

The «Royal Tenenbaums» is Wes Anderson’s best film. And that is because, on a rare occasion, the director’s flamboyant and fetishist stylizations serve a «down-to-earth» story and are used to offer a tender and affectionate touch to a whole gallery of eccentric characters, who by the end of the film have been humanized and have become extremely likable.

Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Bill Murray, Luke Wilson
Duration: 110’ | Starting Time: 21h30

FRIDAY, JULY 13th / Petralona Park
The Haunting, 1963 by Robert Wise

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council and the Athens & Epidaurus Festival

A lonely and sentimentally fragile woman accepts to become the fourth member of a research team which undertakes the task of investigating whether a gothic residence, which is burdened by supernatural stories from the past and morbid rumors, is indeed inhabited by ghosts. What follows is one of the ten best horror films in the history of film and its screening celebrates the 55 years from its first release in the movie theaters.

Starring: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Fay Compton
Duration: 112’ | Starting Time: 23h00

SATURDAY, JULY 14th / Railway Carriage Theater To Treno sto Rouf
Weekend, 1967 by Jean-Luc Godard

Screening within the framework of the French National Day

Through a nightmarish weekend that a completely alienated bourgeois couple has during its trip from Paris to the blood-painted roads of the French countryside, Godard spreads the defeat and collapse of western civilization into a politically charged, poisonously funny, incessantly teasing and revealing landscape of chaos and fear, which consecutively plays with the conventions of the cinema medium, the audience’s tolerance and its own self. With the impact of an artistic grenade and the force of an angry manifesto, Godard’s toxic masterpiece breaks the rules and the taboos like a road roller, it contains snapshots of remarkable virtuosity (like the extensive long shot-achievement in the view of a congestion) and causes shock up until today, testing the tenacity of those who believe they have seen everything in cinema.  

Starring: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky
Duration: 105’ | Starting Time: 21h30

MONDAY, JULY 16th / 260 Peiraios
Surprise - Film

In collaboration with the Athens & Epidaurus Film Festival

With the memories of its adventurous premiere in the movie theaters being still fresh, the most discussed in our country creation of the last three decades, is screened again for the first time after 30 years, without censorship. Do not miss the one and only opportunity to watch it (or re-watch it) in the big screen.

Duration: 164’ | Starting Time: 21h30
The film screening rights are provided by the U.S. Embassy in Athens.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18th / National Archaeological Museum
The Remains of the Day, 1993 by James Ivory

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council and the Athens & Epidaurus Festival

By masterfully transferring on to the big screen the awarded novel of the Japanese origin (and holder of a Nobel Prize in Literature) Kazuo Ishiguro, the director of the films «A Room with a View» and «Howards End» managed to be nominated for 8 Oscar awards.

A masterpiece of screenplay adaptation, classical filmmaking, outstanding performances and exceptional aesthetic quality, Ivory’s film converts into a unique drama the story of a disciplined and exemplary butler who backtracks his life, at an advanced age, when he realises that he has sacrificed any personal desire and happiness of his in the name of duty.

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox, Hugh Grant, Christopher Reeve
Duration: 134’ | Starting Time: 21h30

WEDNESDAY, JULY 25th / Lycabettus Theater Courtyard
Fight Club, 1999 by David Fincher

The paradox story of a repressed man who is looking for a way out in his life and finds it in the illegal (and progressively all the more indecent) actions of a secret fight club. As the 90s were coming to an end this provocative film appeared out of a big Hollywood studio and was meant to  become an object of adoration, hatred, zealotry and meticulous study. «Fight Club» constituted the electrical self-psychoanalysis of the socially castrated Gen-X-er who saw the revolution he always dreamed of for himself, taking place as a figment of his imagination.

Starring: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, Jared Leto
Duration: 139’ | Starting Time: 21h30

FRIDAY, JULY 27th / Agios Kosmas Beach
Boogie Nights, 1997 by Paul Thomas Anderson

A young Californian finds the family he was always looking for in a porn films production house. In it he is re-baptized as Dirk Diggler and starts his meteorite course as one of the «biggest» stars in the field. The more abrupt, however, the rise, the more painful the fall and the landing in the conservative U.S. of the 80s. Taking advantage of a restless camera and an unbeatable cast, Anderson widely opens the doors to the backstage of the porn industry. Behind it he discovers a parallel world of idealists who are fighting to keep their moral values intact faced with a suffocating reality.

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly
Duration: 155’ | Starting Time: 21h30

AUGUST

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22nd / Rematia Theater, Chalandri
The Collector, 1965 by William Wyler

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council

A young and lonely man (Terence Stamp) has kidnapped a student of fine arts (Samantha Eggar) aiming to win her love, even through violence if necessary. Twice awarded with an Oscar, one of the top creators of Hollywood’s golden era, William Wyler left aside the social concerns found in John Fowles’ book and focused on the coexistence of the two main characters forming an unusual (and unique in its kind) erotic film, through the conflict of different worldviews. Three Oscar nominations (Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from another Medium) and two awards in the Cannes Film Festival, one for Terence Stamp and one for Samantha Eggar.

Starring: Terence Stamp, Samantha Eggar, Mona Washbourne
Duration: 119’ | Starting Time: 21h00

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24th / Dionysiou Areopagitou Pedestrian Precinct
The Long Day Closes, 1992 by Terence Davies

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council

Four years after the artistic triumph of his first feature film «Distant Voices, Still Lives» (1988), the great Terence Davies returns again in the past and his hometown: in Liverpool – 1956, in the house he grew up, in the arms of his beloved mother, in the days where the whole world seemed to begin at his family home’s doorstep and finish at the end of the road.

Davies structures through his film a compilation of nostalgia, associations and scattered memories, an audiovisual mosaic consisted of images and sounds, adored music and songs. All these are tenderly laid down in a masterpiece film, which transmits to the audience successive feelings and moods, making the viewer a participant in the details of another life for a while.

Starring: Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates, Anthony Watson, Nicholas Lamont
Duration: 85’ | Starting Time: 21h00

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29th / Numismatic Museum Garden
Lord of the Flies, 1963 by Peter Brook

Tribute «Classics Illustrated: Reading on the big screen» in collaboration with the British Council

One day, out of the blue, war breaks out and a bunch of British schoolchildren find refuge in an exotic island in the middle of nowhere. All alone and unable to contact the outside world, the boys try to organize a society from scratch, despite the constant disputes that threaten the already fragile new circumstance. If hope for a better world effectively lies within the children, this same hope sinks in the most dramatic way in the sea of the Cold-War pessimism which surrounds the island of the «Lord of the Flies» and this masterful adaptation from William Golding’s legendary novel.

Starring: James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards
Duration: 92’ | Starting Time: 21h00

The 8th Athens Open Air Film Festival is carried out in collaboration with the City of Athens Cultural, Sport and Youth Organization including screenings, throughout the whole summer, in the city's special corners, archaeological sites, parks, squares and some of the most beautiful museums and spots in Athens, with free entrance to the public.

«Athens 2018 World Book Capital»

The screenings of the 8th Athens International Film Festival that express literary interest are integrated in the «Athens 2018 World Book Capital» framework, an international distinction received by the Athens municipality and our town from UNESCO which lasts for a year, from April the 23rd 2018 until April the 22nd 2019.

The 8th Athens International Film Festival is member of the cultural network Athens Culture Net - Athens Municipality, which has as founding donor the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

For more information and the detailed program of the 8th Athens Open Air Film Festival, stay tuned at
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