Focus on Angelos Frantzis and Helena Wittman

Visitors to the 48th Drama Short Film Festival will have the opportunity to watch retrospective tributes to the short films of two distinguished filmmakers, alongside the competition programs.

DISFF will have the pleasure of presenting six short films by Angelos Frantzis dating from 1992 to 2014, and eight short films shot by Helena Wittmann from 2004 to 2025, thus showing the evolution of their work over time.

For the first time in Greece, the entire body of short films by the two artists is being presented as part of a broader effort by DISFF to bring the public into contact with the early work of distinguished creators. These films are often hard to find, as in the case of Wittman, while for the complete presentation of Angelos Frantzis’ short films, the Festival proceeded to digitize them—a practice that is high on the agenda of DISFF’s new artistic director, Giorgos Angelopoulos, with the aim of preserving and promoting Greek short films.

The two artists will participate in this year’s jury committees: Angelos Frantzis as a member of the National Competition jury and Helena Wittmann as a member of the International Competition jury.

Angelos Frantzis

Angelos Frantzis is a director and screenwriter. He was born in Athens and studied cinema at INSAS in Brussels. His films (Polaroid, A Dog’s Dream, In the Forest, Symptom, Still River, Eftihia, Murphy’s Law) have won awards and been screened at many international festivals. For several years, he worked as a film critic and was involved in mixed media projects that have been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Athens Festival, and Onassis Cultural Center.

Angelos Frantzis was first introduced to Greek audiences at the 1992 Drama Festival with his short film Small Stories About People and Oranges. This was followed by Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? (1993) and Nineteen (1995).

When, in 1997, he and Stratis Vougioukas shot Hollow World, a short film in black and white Super 8, they wrote the following manifesto, which they brought with them to Drama:

MANIFESTO OF HOLLOW WORLD
(and not only)

We want a cinema defined by our walks, our encounters, our loves. Films written in parks, streets, and squares.

We want a cinema that does not dictate but teaches us to see reality from the beginning.

We want to have fun.

We want cinema that is cinematic, theatrical, literary, musical, pictorial, poetic, realistic, political, imaginative, and alive.

We want a cinema whose ethics define its style and whose style mirrors its ethics.

We want to make films the way we walk, breathe, think, talk, and dream.

We want to accustom the audience to the unusual.

We want to make cinema that depends as little as possible on money.

We want to make cinema that is playful and therefore serious.

We want to say that cinema has never been a window into the world. Cinema is a hole in the world, and “Hollow World” is the manifesto of our cinema.

Helena Wittmann

Helena Wittmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Hamburg. Her films, including her most recent feature film Human Flowers of Flesh (2022) and her first feature film Drift (2017), have been screened internationally at major film festivals and exhibitions (including the Locarno and Venice Film Festivals, Tate Modern, MoMA, Toronto Film Festival, New York International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Mar del Plata, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Viennale, FID Marseille, and FICUNAM), winning numerous awards.

She was a teacher at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts from 2015 to 2018 and worked as a mentor at the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola film school in San Sebastian, Spain. In addition to her directing work, she creates installations and works as a director of photography with other directors and artists.

According to Vasilis Bourikas, curator of the tribute, “Drama International Short Film Festival has always had as its main feature, the discovery and promotion of youth, elements that are reflected in all its competitive programs. Retrospectives, on the other hand, are by nature dedicated to creators and filmographies that have reached artistic maturity, often presenting their early short films as a prism through which to examine their creative beginnings. Helena Wittmann’s cinema offers us a rare opportunity to bridge these two realities. This is just one of the many bridges that Wittmann creates that characterize her work. Fortunately for us, she continues to build them with her short films, alongside her feature films. ”

The tribute will also feature her latest work A Thousand Waves Away (2025), which “combines many of the elements that make up the sensory cinematic experience she offers us, that activates all the senses, even touch.”

AND A FEW MORE

This year, the Drama Festival celebrates 30 years of internationalization by presenting a selection of films that have won the Grand Prix from 1995 to the present. One of the most important milestones in this exciting journey was the short film “Next Floor” by the now famous French-Canadian creator Denis Villeneuve, director of “Dune” and the new James Bond film, which won the Grand Prix for best short film at DISFF in 2008, confirming that every year Drama Short Film Festival introduces us to the filmmakers who will be leaving their mark in the future.

The 48th edition will present two more tributes: films created at the Drama Film Festival’s Short Film Workshop by residents of Drama, starring the city itself, and student films resulting from the “Film Writing, Practice and Research” program by the School of Applied Arts and Sustainable Design of the Hellenic Open University.