This tribute comes few months after the departure of Robert Manthoulis, who played a crucial role in the renewal of Greek cinema in both documentary and fiction film. He was also an exceptional personality, a man of rare talent and deep humanity. He was indeed one of the last surviving great auteurs of his generation.

In the beginning of April, as he was waging his last battle with death, we informed him about how the restoration of his film Face to Face (1966) was going and of the great impression it made to our Italian colleagues at the laboratory of Imagine Ritrovata in Paris—he was happy but also very modest. Robert died on April 21st, exactly 55 years after his film was first screened in Hyeres Festival. It was enthusiastically received by both the public and the critics and, as a result, it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Manthoulis then made statements against the Greek military junta (1967-74) that were broadcast worldwide and the film was banned by the colonels.

Manthoulis, forced to remain in France, started then a long and fruitful collaboration with the French television. In 1985, he embarked on the televisual adaptation of Stratis Tsirkas’s trilogy, Drifting cities (1962-5). The trilogy had fueled a great debate in the Greek Left between, on the one side, the critics who were supporting socialist realism and could not tolerate Tsirkas’s criticism of party politics and, on the other side, the younger ones who were enthusiastic both about the literary form and the criticism of party authoritarianism. The cosmopolitan style and the film quality appealed to the French public making it one of the most successful television series.

Manthoulis’s life, as Maria Katsounaki notes, was marked “by a crave for life, a curiosity and a need to explore the world, repeated flights to the unknown with only the safety net provided by the intimate group of friends. Did they change the world? Manthoulis gave his own answer: ‘The camera can change the world only if the world wants to change’”.

Film selection, introduction: Maria Komninos
Programming: Maria Komninos, Jacob Skenderidis