True to their original statement that days of mourning leave no room for celebration, the organizers of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival have also canceled last Sunday’s solemn closing ceremony. The prizes were, of course, awarded to the winners, as for ten days the documentaries filled the city’s cinemas with ideas, information, hopes, worries, emotions, and in general all kinds of emotions that only they can give. In the end, the best of all was Under the Sky of Damascus by Heba Khaled, Talal Derka and Ali Vazi, which we also saw in a crowded screening at the Olympic Theatre.

The image of entire districts of Damascus razed to the ground by war is shocking in itself, but no less shocking are the stories of the people living next to them. In particular, the women we follow are finding their way into the arts and theater to speak out about the sexual abuse they have experienced. The injustice and crimes of patriarchal structures are at the center of the film here, which nonetheless forms a broader canvas of one of the planet’s most turbulent regions. Lighter, but no less interesting, was The Last Seagull, a documentary from Bulgaria about… a harpoon like the ones in old Rhodes. The elderly professional of the genre is still practicing his craft in a seaside resort in a neighboring country in a delightful film that allegorically tells about the Balkans of the past and today.

The Greek documentary by Konstantinos Georgopoulos, shown on the last day of the festival, has even more historical content. “New Motherland” about the genocide and (mainly) the subsequent journey of Armenians who arrived in the already wounded Greece of the 1920s. The film’s camera visits Armenian communities from Athens to Alexandroupolis, sketching in detail their origins and telling touching personal stories of people who retain their roots as members of a new multicultural society.

However, the most special of the screenings we attended this year in Thessaloniki was a screening of a couple of Greek films: a short and a feature. The first was “Going Inside” by Giorgos Danopoulos, who placed his cell in Korydallos Prison, where a painting workshop offers six people a way out of a hopeless prison. By contrast, in Domenicos Ignatiadis’ Prison Blues, a group of former drug addicts travel to various prisons in the country to show a documentary about prisoners. The film’s deep human insight, poignant humor, and a few almost-fictional characters prove that a good documentary can be made with even minimal means.