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.

Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)

Originally titled Jerry and Joan during production, this charming and exquisitely directed pre-code melodrama was later renamed to the slightly controversial Merrily We Go to Hell. The film features Sylvia Sidney as a wealthy woman who marries a journalist (brilliantly portrayed by Fredric March), only to struggle with her husband’s alcoholism and his unexpected reunion with an old flame. Typical of its studio of production, Paramount, and reflective of some of the bolder pre-code films, the marriage—which quickly deteriorates—is depicted in an open, sophisticated manner, set against the backdrop of lavish art deco sets.