The screenings of the 25th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival are slowly coming to an end in a less festive atmosphere than one would like, but the sadness of the days leaves no room for celebration. The organizers have also decided to cancel tomorrow’s closing ceremony so that the winners will receive their awards unofficially. Ugly, but necessary. It is good that all these days in Thessaloniki documentaries were shown from those that expand the boundaries of the emotional and mental, because cinema is always some kind of therapy.

We saw one of the most interesting films of this year on Thursday evening: The Olympian in Aristotle’s Square fills up despite the accelerated time for the legendary Werner Herzog’s new documentary, which was screened out of competition. “The Theater of Thought” is a journey through the secret – or not so – ways of the human mind, this wonderful labyrinth that controls our movements, our desires, our very existence. Through successive meetings with the leading scientists and thinkers of our time, Duke tries to make the incredibly complex accessible and succeeds in many ways.

Almost all of them (specialists) are looking for the key to the human brain elsewhere: from the immobile mouse to the humble hydra, a tiny but completely amazing creature, the study of which opens up the most insane vistas. In general, Herzog’s film is constantly acrobat between absolute scientific realism and some – rather frightening – grandiose plans being built between arrays of quantum computers. And the questions that arise are extremely interesting: how do different neurons in the brain “know” that they belong to the same system and act accordingly? How some people manage to be completely in control, for example. feeling of fear? How elusive is the dream of a telepathic connection between two brains? All this with its obvious practical, philosophical, moral ramifications, which the Duke approaches in his usual playful style.

Oddly, the latter’s film also features the work of another film veteran, this time a Greek, who is also featured on FNTH. Philippos Koutsaftis has already left a significant legacy in Greek documentary filmmaking with twenty years of Agelasto Petra and his subsequent creations. This year, when “Petra” comes to the fore again because of Eleusis, which holds the title of European Capital of Culture for 2023, he decides to send us to Crete, namely to Zakros, the gateway of the Minoan civilization to the East.

“Zakros” begins right there, at the entrance gates of houses, the remains of which have been excavated for decades by archaeologists of different generations. Referring to footage from his filming in the late 1980s as well as today, Koutsaftis uses his familiar poetic style to extend the language of stone and clay to the galaxy… Andromeda. And if at times he is still too carried away by the flight of thought, then his subject is not so different from the ducal one: small and seemingly insignificant, which nevertheless hides the eternal in itself.