11/09/2013 - Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha and Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color will bookend the festival's 206 film line-up

Record-breaking submissions lead to a 206-film line-up at this year's edition of the Athens International Film Festival (September 18-29), which boasts a selection of 15 local features along its 30 European productions, France having the lion’s share with 13 films in tow.

Palm d’ Or contenders Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty [+see also:
film review
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interview: Paolo Sorrentino
film profile] and Asghar Farhadi’s The Past [+see also:
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film profile], loom largely over the fest’s Premieres section, which includes such titles as John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon and Robert Redford’s All is Lost, among its selection of high-prestige films, all scheduled to hit local theatres shortly after their festival bows.

The Greek Films section will be world-premiering Nikos Panayotopoulos’ road-movie The Limousine, Savvas Karidas’ noir drama Illusion, Thanos Kermitsis’ crowdfunded debut The Dragophoenix Chronicles: Indomitable, based on the titular graphic novel by Yannis Roumboulias, and Angelos Spartalis’ take on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a venture dubbed as the country’s first animated feature film.

Greek-Serbian co-production The Tree and the Swing [+see also:
trailer
interview: Maria Douza
film profile] by Maria Ntouza and Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’ The Enemy Within [+see also:
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film profile], both screened in Montreal, will have their European premieres at the fest, which will also feature Michalis Konstantatos’ Luton [+see also:
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film profile], shortly after its San Sebastian premiere.

Alex Van Warmerdam and Ari Folman will be this year’s guests of honour, presenting their respective retrospectives. Local film-criticism guru Yiannis Bakogiannopoulos has been granted the fest’s carte blanche to screen some of his favorites, while directors Yann Gonzalez (Les Recontres d’Apres Minuit [+see also:
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film profile]) and Vincent Grashaw (Coldwater) along with Cannes awarded actress Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color [+see also:
film review
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interview: Abdellatif Kechiche
film profile] - photo) will be among the talent visiting the fest to present their films.