Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival | Restored section's introduction and notes

Introduction to and programme notes for the "restored and beautiful" section at the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, December 2025. — EK

The films in this section, spanning six formative decades of cinema history, start and end in the Middle East, offering a sense of the resilience of its people. The canonical documentary masterpiece Grass (1925) follows three Americans traveling among the nomadic tribes of Iran, while Ghazl El-Banat (1985) adopts an insider’s point of view in which the great Arab filmmaker Jocelyne Saab gently removes the shrapnel from the wounded body of her hometown, Beirut.

If Ghazl El-Banat is its director’s finest work, then Craig’s Wife (1936) is the masterpiece of American director Dorothy Arzner. A tale of a toxic lady of the house, no melodrama has so precisely and exhilaratingly explored the intertwined themes of house, territory, and power.

In this small selection, couples of all kinds question their relationships, with cracks appearing—and often widening—amid various social backdrops. You’ll see a dazzlingly hip, nouvelle-vogue–style treatment of this theme in Slovenia’s Na papirnatih avionih (1967) and a darkly allegorical take on it in 1970s Iran in Postchi (1972), which was impossible to see for decades.

Postchi is stark and troubling, but the same hallucinatory and inward-looking narrative can also be found in the quintessential British film Performance (1968-70) featuring Mick Jagger in a role no rock star today would dare to touch. The directorial team of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, like Jocelyne Saab, reveal the uncharted corners of cities – here London in the 1960s – and the minds of the people who inhabit them. They also explore the destruction within.

These films are about the visible and invisible scars of humanity and the grandeur of rare glimpses into the human soul, as well as some of the most impeccable restorations completed in recent months thanks to the tireless work of archivists, restorers, and film historians.

The restored films:

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life – Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, Marguerite Harrison

One of the canonical greats of the silent era by the duo Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack—today mostly remembered for their iconic sound-era masterpiece King Kong—is a documentary on the heroic annual migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes of Iran. The filmmakers join them just in time for their spring migration through inhumanly arduous routes. The restless filmmakers identify with the people they follow, transforming their journey into some of the grandest vistas of silent cinema ever captured on film.

Craig's Wife – Dorothy Arzner

Two days in the life of a married couple in their New York mansion. The lady of the house, Harreit Craig (a brilliant Rosalind Russell), destroys anyone who stands between her and the house she is determined to control. Directed by Dorothy Arzner—the only female and openly lesbian director in 1930s–40s Hollywood—in this crowning jewel of American cinema, the territory assigned to women in melodramas becomes an almost abstract concept of power and domesticity, transformed into a battlefield.

Na papirnatih avionih [On Wings of Paper] – Matjaž Klopčič

A New Wave–style love story set in Ljubljana, featuring a remarkably fresh opening sequence crafted as both an homage to and a parody of film noir, the French New Wave, silent cinema, and the world of advertising. One of the finest Slovenian films of the 1960s, On Wings of Paper manages to make us forget for 80 minutes that it was made under communism—although all the disillusionments delicately depicted in the film are a direct product of that system.

Performance – Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg

In this one-of-a-kind film set in swinging London, Mick Jagger plays a retired rock star whose identity merges with that of a notorious gangster on the run, while the sexuality of both undergoes transformation. Images and sounds, like the minds of the characters, are altered and pushed into unseen/unheard cinematic territory, where the genius of Cammell and Roeg functions like LSD coursing through a film that could have been a conventional identity-swap tale. Instead, it became so controversial that it remained unreleased for two years.

Postchi [The Postman] – Dariush Mehrjui

An indispensable work of the Iranian New Wave, Postchi is a biting critique of Iran’s blind Westernization in the tale of Taghi, a shy, slavish postman humiliated by his wife, his boss, and the local landowner for whom he works as a part-time manservant. The film possesses an uncanny ability to shift almost imperceptibly from symbolic satire to a metaphysical realm, as the camera slowly surrenders to Taghi’s fractured psyche—where his terrified and terrifying subjectivity becomes our own.

Ghazl El-Banat [The Razor's Edge] – Jocelyne Saab

Directed by one of the luminaries of Arab cinema, Jocelyne Saab, this tale of platonic love between a young refugee girl and a middle-aged painter is part of a series of films—though the rest are documentaries—that Saab made about her hometown, Beirut, under siege, shelling and civil war. In light of recent massacres in the Middle East, particularly in Gaza, the film stands as a shattering testimony to the act of believing in beauty under the shadow of imminent death and destruction.