III. Greek Events

Penny Panayotopoulou's
HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER

For more information about the film, log onto www.HardGoodbyes.com

The critically-acclaimed and award-winning film from Greece, HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER (Diskoli Apocheretismi: O Babas Mou), will have its first showing in Washington on Friday April 22nd at the Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 NE 50th St., in Seattle, kicking off an exclusive limited one-week-only engagement.

"Panayotopoulou has crafted a very unique picture...Through lighting choices, Panayotopoulou manages to make the simple act of leaving one's house an effective depiction of loneliness and despair. The final shot, a moment of Elias taking a late-night boat ride, is nothing short of stunning."

-- Bob Grimm, Las Vegas City Life

"An unusual boy takes his own small steps toward reconciling the universe."

-- John Anderson, Newsday

HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER tells the story of a 10-year-old boy in Athens who makes a pact with his father to watch the televised account of the first moon landing in July, 1969. The boy and his father are dreamers and explorers; they have read and reread the stories of Jules Verne, the man who had envisioned "a shot to the moon" one century earlier. Like a magician, Elias' father transforms their middle-class existence in Athens into another world. Their blue car becomes a spaceship ("Birbilo") that they imagine will travel all the way to the moon.

Elias worships his father. But his father is often away on business trips, and one day, he doesn't come back. The nighttime promise will go unkept. And Elias must rely on their shared love of storytelling and the imagination to transcend the unimaginable.

HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER has already won a number of international prizes, including the FIPRESCI Prize ("for its acute symbiosis of daily routine and metaphorical sense of life"), as well as Best Actor Award and Greek Film Critics Prize at the

2002 International Thessaloniki Film Festival. Athens-based writer/director Penny Panayotopoulou also won the Best Directorial Debut Award at the 2002 Greek State Cinema Awards. Giorgos Karayannis, who stars as the film's 10-year-old hero, won the 2002 Locarno International Film Festival's Leopard Prize for Best Actor. His competition: Gerard Depardieu, Robin Williams and Matt Damon. The Children's Jury of the 2002 Olympia International Film Festival awarded the film its Best Feature Prize.

In September 2004, the film won the Best Screenplay award at the 1st International Film Festival of Sale (Morocco). The film festival highlighted films from 13 countries about or by women and is considered of the first of its kind in Africa.

Special mention actually went to FRIDA. And the Grand Jury Prize went to SINCE OTAR LEFT.

In November 2004 HARD GOODBYES: MY FATHER also won the Interfaith Award at the St. Louis International Film Festival. The award recognizes a film for its artistic merit, contribution to the understanding of the human condition and
recognition of ethical, social and spiritual values.

Writer-director Penny Panayotopoulou recounts, "I made this film because I felt real pain for all those things we lose as we grow up, pain that I wanted to soothe by telling a story. I created a real hero out of an innocent little person whose

longing would lead him to free himself from every adult pact with everyday life, taking the giant step, the first in his life, to rocket to the stars, there where gravity would no longer have any importance.