Nikos Koundouros
Director · 1926 – 2017 · Athens, Greece
Nikos Koundouros (Greek: Νίκος Κούνδουρος; 15 December 1926 – 22 February 2017) was a Greek film director. Koundouros was born in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, in 1926. He studied painting and sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts. During the war he was a member of the left-wing resistance movement EAM-ELAS, and because of this was subsequently exiled to the Makronissos prison island. At the age of 28 he decided to follow a career in cinematography. He started his career as a director of the film Magiki Polis (1954), where he combined his neorealism influences with his own artistic viewpoint. He cast Thanasis Veggos, who he had met at Makronissos, as one of the characters in Magiki Polis. After the release of his complex and innovative film O Drakos, he found acceptance as a prominent artist in Greece and Europe, and acquired important awards in various international and Greek film festivals. His 1963 film Young Aphrodites won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1985 he was a member of the jury at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival.
Movies6
MovieDocumentaryIn the early 70s Greek cinema entered in a period of crisis. One of its aspects was said "crisis of issues" and one of the exits heard in the name "erotic cinema". The genre was already acquaintance from the abundance of foreigner films, that was distributed in the grindhouses under the "adults only" motto and its Greek version had a lot of variants.
MovieDocumentaryAn approach to the phenomenon of Thanasis Vengos, the man and the artist, through film excerpts, testimonies of his collaborators and relatives and analyses of his symbolic role in the post-war modern Greek reality. Thanasis Vengos, for more than fifty years, was one of the most important actors in Greece. His films and lines are written in history, raising more than three generations of Greeks.
MovieCrime
Movie6.0DocumentaryA comic tale. The issue of film education has been a Gordian link for many years in Greece. Starting from the time of Stavrakos in 1950, the documentary reaches up to the present day, exploring this issue through a dialogue between the people who dealt and are dealing. Among them Theodoros Angelopoulos, Pantelis Voulgaris, Dinos Katsouridis, Nikos Koundouros, Manos Zacharias, Werner Herzog, Emir Kustouritsa, Fatih Akin.
- MovieDocumentary
A cinematic portrait of director Nikos Koundouros, this documentary explores his artistic journey through the voices of renowned Greek artists, tracing the experiences and influences that shaped his visionary work.
Odyssea Corporum - Ballad for Nikos Koundouros
Οδύσσειες σωμάτων – Μπαλάντα για τον Νίκο Κούνδουρο
2010
Movie7.0DocumentaryA documentary about cinema censorship during the dictatorship in Greece (1967- 1974), based on never-before-seen state archives. The film includes clips of films which were either censored or banned, newsreels of that era, interviews with famous directors and also secret documents from the reports of the Censorship Committee that are made public for the first time, portraying a revealing picture of the system’s control mechanisms and providing a fresco of that time.