Documentaries from Romania, the US and Jordan were among the winners at the 28th Agora industry programme of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival.
Romanian filmmaker Ana Vijdea’s debut feature documentary Nava Mama won the top prize of €10,000 from the Athens-based International Emerging Talent Fund (IEFTF).
It was chosen by a jury which included Swedish producer Malin Hüber and IDFA Bertha Fund’s executive director Selin Murat
The Romania-France co-production by Vijdea’s company Remora Films with Paris-based Les Steppes Productions follows a trans teenager as he returns to the native Romanian village where his father’s abuse had scarred his childhood in a quest for resilience, identity and belonging.
Sophie Ataya’s Who We Are, also a journey through memory, identity and trauma, received the Dok Leipzig award and Aylon Production Digital Services award.
Produced by Berlin-based Seera Films, Ataya’s debut feature documentary will focus on her journey to reclaim her hidden Palestinian heritage. She grew up in an East German village where any connection to it was met with silence from family, the community and, by extension, the German state.
Documentaries addressing traumatic chapters in recent Greek history were also recognised in the Agora awards ceremony.
Thanassis Vassiliou’s second feature documentary, Unwanted Past received the ERT Thessaloniki Pitching Forum award as well as the prestigious independent Onassis Award. The film is about the Greek government’s 1989 decision to burn 17m files on political convictions of Greek citizens and the discovery in Thessaloniki in 2025 of skeletons of executed communists from the Greek civil war that took place from 1946 to 1949.
Award-winning Greek investigative journalist and filmmaker Marianna Kakaounaki received the Impronta Films guidance award of consultancy services in the Docs in Progress section for Mati 2307.
Her second feature documentary charts the battle of a grieving mother and a whistleblower to hold those responsible accountable for one of Greece’s darkest days, when 103 people died in a wildfire in Mati, east of Athens, in the summer of 2018.
The Docs in Progress jury of sales agent Anja Dziersk (Rise&Shine), FIPRESCI president Ahmed Shawky and Romanian producer and EFA chairperson Ada Solomon presented their main award to Ukrainian-American filmmaker Brian Logvinsky’s debut feature documentary Immortal Flowers. It follows three friends inside Kyiv’s underground, living between strict curfews, air raids and the draft.
The Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Centre (HFAC) award and Neaniko Plano subtitling award also went to debut feature-length documentaries. Athens-based editor and documentary filmmaker Smaro Papaevangelou took home HFAC’s €3,000 cash prize for Careful Where You Tread, which sees her begin filming her father after realising that their relationship, despite sharing a home, was shaped by emotional distance.
Jordanian filmmaker Rama Ayasra will benefit from subtitling services offered by Athens-based Neaniko Plano for Landwards which follows an elderly shepherd in water-scarce Jordan who is forced to pay rent to farm his ancestral land as the ancient rural communities quietly disappear.
Changing of the guard
Agora head Angeliki Vergou used the awards ceremony tp make “a small announcement” that she will be taking up a new at the two Thessaloniki festivals as Agora advisor, international partnerships and development.
She is passing the baton of the industry programmes to Agora manager Thanos Stavropoulos.
Vergou has been working in various departments and positions at the Thessaloniki festival since 2001 and heading up the Agora industry sections of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival since 2022.
“[Vergou’s] vision and energy, her expertise and interpersonal skills, her heart, her intuition, her leadership have enabled our two Agoras to become benchmarks,” said Thessaloniki’s general director Elise Jalladeau. “Fortunately, she will remain with us, as part of our team, to continue this work and work with us to make European and regional cinema and documentaries even stronger and more meaningful.”
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