29/11/2005

For Thessaloniki Film Festival president George Corraface the party goes on. A day after he declared the event officially over, Chariton’s Choir (I horodia tou Charitona), the film in which the French-Greek actor plays an idiosyncratic teacher in a provincial town, won best feature film during the Greek national cinema awards.

All of the year’s Greek production was screened during the Festival but the Ministry of Culture national cinema awards were handed out in a separate ceremony, a day after the Festival had officially ended.
“This is a reward for some hard work by many people. I’ve started preparing this film almost eight years ago” said the film’s director Gregory Karadinakis who also received a hefty cheque of € 58,700.
Ironically it was Karadinakis that had verbally attacked the state’s “lack of enthusiasm for solving Greek cinema’s crisis” a day earlier during a Ministry press conference.
Chariton’s Choi, which is 44-year-old Karadinakis’ first feature film, is produced by Safe Company, Greek public broadcaster ERT, Greek Film Centre, Nova, Cinefilm, Accelere, CL Productions, Graal.
It beat The Wake (Agrypnia) by Nikos Grammatikos and Hostage (Omiros) by Constantinos Yannaris in second and third place for best film respectively. Yannaris though won best director. The award for best newcomer went to Makis Papadimitratos for his film Tsiou while Spiro Taraviras won best documentary for his film Buzz about A.I. Bezzerides, a Hollywood screenwriter, a Greek national who was once described by director Francois Truffaut as “Hollywood’s first film noir screenwriter”.
Greece’s junior Minister for Culture Petros Tatoulis, present during the awards, has repeated an earlier pledge that the new cinema law that “should solve chronic problems of Greek film production” will soon enter parliament.