The Thessaloniki Film Festival bids farewell to Dimitri Eipides
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival and its people bid farewell to Dimitri Eipides, the creator and founder of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and for years director of the institution. Dimitri Eipides, who created the section New Horizons, opening a window to a great cinema, which was unknown to Europe until then, passed away on Wednesday.
Dimitri Eipides taught us how to watch documentaries, how to discover filmmakers. Cinema was his life. In myth he found the anthropocentric stories that originate from reality. He served this kind of cinema throughout the world, in Thessaloniki, Montreal, Toronto and Reykjavik.
In 1971 he founded the Festival international du nouveau cinéma de Montréal and was its director for 14 years. From 1988 until recently he was a senior member of the Toronto International Film Festival, as an International Programmer. From 2005 to 2010, he was head programmer of the Reykjavik International Film Festival. In 1993, the Iranian Culture Minister gave him an honorary award recognizing his contribution to the promotion of Iranian cinema internationally. He was the beloved uncle Dimitri of the Iranian filmmakers.
In 1999, he founded our beloved Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, his child, as he called it. He convinced viewers that documentary is a love affair that surpasses its own art and becomes part of our life.
We will always remember him in front of a screen, watching a film, explaining passionately why it is ideal for a festival, ideal for our soul.
We express our sincere condolences to his family.
