Onassis Foundation at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival

Following her Cannes award-winning film “On Xerxes’ Throne,” Onassis Culture supports director Evi Kalogiropoulou in her first feature-length film. “Gorgonà” is set in a small, decaying city-state, where a giant refinery dominates the landscape and produces the only resource available to its inhabitants: oil. Armed men hold absolute power. Their leader, Nikos, is gravely ill and must choose a successor. His decision to include his protégé Maria among the candidates sparks fierce reactions. The fate of this young woman, who was unaware of the most shocking part of her family’s history, will shift dramatically with the arrival of Eleni, a singer at the town’s bar.

“Gorgonà” enriches Kalogiropoulou’s filmography, which explores themes of exclusion and inclusion, multicultural identity, the female presence through the lens of ancient Greek mythology, and post-apocalyptic environments. The film, produced by Neda Film, is a co-production of Onassis Culture, Blue Monday Productions, and Kidam, with international sales by Playtime. The cast includes Melissanthi Mahut, Aurora Marion, Christos Loulis, Kostas Nikouli, Stavros Svigos, Errika Bigiou, Niki Vakali, Xenia Dania, Erifyli Kitzoglou, Myrto Kontoni, Nayla Gougni, Iraklis Chuzinov, and Vasilis Michas.

“Gorgonà” will premiere on August 31, 2025, at the Venice International Critics’ Week (Settimana Internazionale della Critica).

The award-winning director of "Synecdoche, New York" and "Anomalisa", as well as Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind", Charlie Kaufman, filmed "How to Shoot a Ghost" in Athens, "a city in which the bones of history are always on display", as he notes. "How to Shoot a Ghost" explores mortality as fact and as metaphor and is the second part of a diptych—following Jackals & Fireflies—both written by poet Eva HD. In the film, two newly dead young people wander the streets of Athens and find consolation in the difficult beauty of existence and its aftermath.

Regarding his choice of Athens as the film’s backdrop, Kaufman explains: “Athens is a city in which the bones of history are always on display—whether it’s the living scars from the dictatorship of the 1970s or the presence of monuments that stood during the plague that wiped out so many citizens two thousand years ago. It is the perfect location to explore the tangle of past and present, and how the policies and longings of the dead go on living within us.”

“How to Shoot a Ghost” is an Unmade, Soft Focus Films, and Monarch Kaleidoscope production, co-produced with Green Olive Films, in association with Nightjar Films and Liaison Pictures, with the support of Onassis Culture and the participation of the Athens Film Office and the Municipality of Athens.

The film is set to world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, and it will be screened for the first time in Greece at Onassis Stegi in 2026.

The myth of life and the labyrinth of loss. “Blur”, an extended reality theatrical production, unfolds as a dreamscape, taking participants on a journey of reflection on grief and eternality. Written and directed by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg, the mixed reality experience is a new myth for the modern age, where science has changed how we think about life and death.

Co-produced by PHI Studio (Canada), Riverbed Theatre Ltd. (Taiwan), and Onassis Culture, this poetic fusion of live performance and extended reality immerses you in a world where the boundaries between real and virtual, natural and artificial, collapse.

Premiered in March 2025 in Taiwan, “Blur” shattered conventional storytelling and took the audience through a transformative narrative that challenges their perceptions and evokes a deeper connection to human existence.

France, USA / 20 min / installation, virtual reality

What stories does our body tell? “Collective Body” is an interactive virtual reality experience that encourages us to reconnect with ourselves and one another through movement. Rather than removing us from reality, the experience uses VR to ground us collectively in the physical world, while simultaneously offering a new perception of who we are as distinct individuals within a collective whole.

With the help of narration and interactive music, participants engage in improvised, free-form movement: their gestures are transformed into expressive visual representations, creating personalized avatars that evolve throughout the installation.

“The body’s capacity to tell stories and perceive the world is at the core of my work. […] Through dance, I learned that my body can be a ‘mobile banquet’—full of endless discoveries and silent stories waiting to be shared.

This curiosity about the body’s wisdom defines my artistic research, and through my work, I aim to highlight the body’s intuition and its sophisticated ability to interact with the world. To make sense of the world around it.”—Sarah Silverblatt-Buser

From lost and missing archives through time to ghosts—both erotic and historical—that visit the elder Cavafy in his poems. A three-dimensional handmade book that is read collectively by the audience within a sound installation. The piece is a response to the archive of poet C. P. Cavafy, inspired by the blank and torn pages of “Constantinopoliad, an epic”—the diary Cavafy kept as a teenager when he and his family fled Alexandria for Constantinople.

The installation version of “Constantinopoliad” is co-produced by Onassis ONX. It was originally commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, supported by residencies at Onassis AiR, and with the support of the Cavafy Archive, Athens. The piece premiered at National Sawdust as part of “Archive of Desire” Festival, 2023.