Cinematic Approaches

The numbers are relentless when it comes to showing that today’s Greek cinematic community overlooks or underestimates the need to produce films addressing an audience of children and teenagers. However, this is not due to directors not being interested in the issues of childhood, puberty and early youth. At the Short Film Festival of Drama, Greece, we have the pleasure every year to watch many films featuring children, teenagers and young adults as their heroes. Some of those films seek to talk about the way our identity settles during the turbulent years of puberty or early youth (the concept of ‘coming of age’), others discuss the many challenges that a young person faces in Greece of today, while others venture to critically dissect the peculiarities of the Greek family. In this year’s feature, we give the floor to fourteen Greek directors, five of whom live and work abroad; those directors, each and every one of them in their own way, introduce to the adult audience the coming generation, namely the generation that is already here and is struggling to find its place.This is not a case of films by “young directors arriving from the future”, but rather the fruit of the efforts of talented filmmakers, who work hard and with scant resources, to ultimately create original stories, which fill both the big screen and our hearts. These films are aimed at an adult audience, but teenage girls and boys can gain a lot by watching them.