This year has been an explosion. 63rd Thessaloniki Festival (which ends tomorrow). He seems to be living in the rhythm of the post-COVID era. The attendance of the public exceeded all expectations, with a clear shift towards the younger, festival and very young generation. However, the “line” of artistic director Orestis Andreakis is to honor the history and continuity of cinema. And this was manifested this year both in the central tribute to Thodoros Angelopoulos, and in the presence of Pantelis Voulgaris and the actors of the film “Everything is a Road” (since 1998), as well as in the award of the honorary Golden Alexander to Finos Film. for a valuable 80-year contribution to Greek cinema, as well as for the “spotlight” in the film work of the versatile Maria Gavala.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “landed” at noon yesterday at a frenzied pace of screenings and events at the Olympian. Symbolic and strategic visit. He decided to come to Agora, the development section of the festival, on the opening day of the new Agora Series section, where experienced producers and specialized audiovisual professionals from all over the world focus on the future of this sector. The world is changing rapidly, movies and series are communicating vessels, the Prime Minister was there, organized and informed.

Yesterday at noon the day belonged Charlotte Gainsbourg, this prominent actress and singer is a mixture of her father, Serge Gainsbourg, and her mother, Jane Birkin. Last night she came to the festival to present her new film “The Night Visitors” by Michael Hirs. OUR “K” met her – the interview will be published in the near future – a few hours before the official screening at the Olympian. She arrived at the hotel in the afternoon along with her second daughter (she has three children). Very simple, in jeans (she can’t tell them), striped shirt and beige trench coat, very thin, no makeup at all. And immediately began her planned (very few) interviews.

“What a coincidence!” we told her. “Yesterday at the festival we saw Joanna Hogg’s film The Eternal Daughter. The title may also represent you. Do you also feel like an “eternal daughter”? “Yes very!” he replied without hesitation. “After my sister died, we lived in New York for six years. It was different there, no one recognized me. But when we returned to Paris, I was “daughter” again. I made a documentary with my mother and/or Charlotte’s Jane, my father’s house will open as a museum, early 23. Thus, I always refer to myself as a “daughter”.

This year’s event ends tomorrow with an unexpectedly large crowd, but also… unexpected visitors.

Somehow, two completely different films ended up “communicating” with each other in an unorthodox way. Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Gainsbourg “gone” from the Olympic screen, one as an actress/daughter, and the other literally as an “eternal daughter”.

The Night Guests is set in the 80s. The film opens on the night of the 1981 elections, with the great euphoria of Mitterrand’s victory, a spirit of change and hope reigns in Paris. However, for the heroine, the opposite is true: her marriage has just ended and she needs to find a job to support herself and her two children. Time of dreams, the heroine will try to break the shackles of a dependent woman, a lonely girl will find refuge in her house, her family will accept her, her free spirit will affect their lives. A very discreet film, it is filled with the presence of Gainsbourg.

The Eternal Daughter takes a very insightful look at the relationship between parents and children, and especially mother and daughter. The artist and her aging mother stumble upon the buried secrets of the past as they return to the family mansion – a now-empty, somewhat abandoned hotel reminiscent of gothic decor, a haunted memory house shrouded in mist, dust and eerie light. Psychological landscapes that Joanna Hogg specializes in, with a protagonist who can be called her fetish, Tilda Swinton.

It leaves a sense of mystery bordering on a thriller at the beginning, but as time goes on, you realize that the focus is elsewhere: “We” are our parents, our father or our mother, and by how much? The mystery, as Hogg presents it as a “ghost story”, revolves around the life of the parents. The “mystery” that we have faced over the years. We think we know them as a pair of old shoes, but no, they display unpredictable aspects, unequivocally familiar and alien, tyrannical, domineering, as well as overprotective, binding, shaping our present and future.

Joanna Hogg, directed by Tilda Swindon, offers a revealing film that is mentally and cinematically complex in equal measure.