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Greek cinema

The Greek cinema is one of the most important pieces of Modern Greek culture despite of its short living span and the limited amount of resources provided by the Greek cinematographic production. Greek cinema gave birth to numerous masterpieces of the cinematographic art and elected important directors, scriptwriters, directors of photography, composers and remarkable actors. In www.cinemainfo.gr we treat Greek cinema as a single entity and we do not make the usual segregation of labeling the old cinema as commercial and new cinema as qualitative. We consider this separation as a false statement. If Greek cinema has to be separated into groups for historical reasons, we can distinguish three different periods:

The Pre-war period. It includes the first attempts of creating a local cinematographic production.

The Post-war period, which begins for the most part in the end of the occupation of Greece with the film “Claps” by Giorgos Tzavellas.

And the Post-regime period, which began with the liberation of the artistic forces following the dictatorship. We consider the brilliant film “Thiasos/ The Traveling Players” (1975) by Theo Angelopoulos the starting point of this new era. We could start mentioning this third period already from 1965-67 but the dictatorship taken place in the capital, Athens, held back the creativity of a lot of the new up and coming filmmakers. In our books, commercial and qualitative segregation does not exist in the Greek cinema. Just like in all the rest of the arts, there is good and bad art, the same he there is good and bad cinema, regardless which side the filmmakers place themselves in.