SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Greek Film Festival (SFGFF) will take place April 22-30. All programming is to be announced along with other details on the SFGFF website: https://grfilm.com. The Festival team is delighted to have a full nine days of in-person screenings at Delancey Screening Room, 600 The Embarcadero in San Francisco, in addition to online program offerings.

This year, SFGFF marks its 20th anniversary. Back in 2004, a dedicated group of Greek-Americans combined their love for their home country of Greece and appreciation for cinema, to create an event that would present the works of contemporary Greek and Cypriot creators to San Francisco Bay Area audiences. They partnered with the Modern Greek Studies Foundation https://mgsf.org, which already had two decades of work in celebrating the importance and beauty of Hellenic culture. Not only is 2023 the 20th year of the SFGFF, it is also the first year of the Modern Greek Studies Foundation’s relationship with the Modern Greek and Hellenic Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, establishing the Nikos Kazantzakis Visiting Scholar Program. Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) is a giant of modern Greek literature, the most widely read modern Greek writer, whose work has been translated into 52 languages, and who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature nine times. His well-known novels include  Zorba the Greek, Christ Recrucified, Captain Michalis, The Last Temptation of Christ, and his most personal novel, Report to Greco, an autobiographical tale of his spiritual and intellectual journey.

A special event will be held on Tuesday, April 18, 5-8 PM, to celebrate the inauguration of the Nikos Kazantzakis Visiting Scholar Program at UC Berkeley and to congratulate the SFGFF for its 20th Anniversary. The event will be held at International House, UC Berkeley Campus, 2299 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley.

The honorary guests will be Niki Stavrou, CEO Kazantzakis Estate; Pavlos Kavouras, Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage; and Consul General of Greece in San Francisco Socrates Sourvinos.

The SFGFF now in its 20th year, is the first and longest-running Greek film festival in the U.S. It has been produced continuously since 2004, including a virtual festival during the pandemic. The Northern California Greek-American community, with its strong support of Greek culture, has been part of the extended SFGFF family, faithfully attending the Festival through the years. The storytelling of Greek and Cypriot filmmakers has unique and broad appeal to all audiences, and local cinephiles are enthusiastic patrons of SFGFF screenings. SFGFF provides opportunities for emerging Greek and Cypriot filmmakers to show their work, and also celebrates important artists from the history of Greek cinema. Legendary Greek performer Melina Mercouri’s Topkapi was screened in 2020, marking the centennial of her birth; and the documentary feature on Olympia Dukakis by Harry Mavromichalis, Olympia, was screened in 2019.

More information is available online: https://grfilm.com.

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