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Dimitris Kanellopoulos makes his directorial debut with “Pack of Sheep,” a portrait of the corrosive effects of violence on the male inhabitants of a small Greek town, which has its world premiere in the main competition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

The story unfolds as Thanasis (Dimitris Lalos), a family man struggling to pay his debt to a local loan shark, joins forces with several townsmen to negotiate more favorable terms to settle their accounts. But when two petty criminals arrive in the town, looking to strongarm the men into paying up, they’re soon caught up in a cycle of violence that threatens to spin out of control.

For his first feature, Kanellopoulos said he was urged by a friend to write a noir story that captured the unique, wintery atmosphere of the island where he was raised. He began writing in the darkest period of Greece’s economic crisis,...

When the curtain rises Thursday on the 62nd edition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, it will be a long-awaited return to form for one of the oldest fests on the circuit, after a surge in Covid-19 cases last fall forced the organizers to pivot from a hybrid to a fully online edition.

Attempting to sum up his feelings on the eve of opening night, festival director Orestis Andreadakis was gripped by emotion, using words like “strange,” “happy” and “anxious” in the same breath.

“It’s as if you go out from the hospital, this period of pandemic, and you don’t know how to speak to your friends, you don’t know how to be in love again, you don’t know how to speak with your relatives and parents and children,” Andreadakis tells Variety. “But at the same time, you have a big appetite for life.”

For the veteran film critic,...

The Sarajevo Film Festival’s CineLink Work in Progress section has become a major venue for filmmakers from Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – this year it saw nearly 70 submissions, the most in the past decade.

The competitive program boasts a large number of projects that have gone on to achieve major success. This year the fest is screening three films that took part in past Work in Progress editions, including Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s documentary “Honeyland,” winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance; Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s “Cat in the Wall,” which unspooled at Locarno; and Radu Dragomir’s “Mo.”

Among the 11 projects selected this year were nine features and two documentaries, including Dimitris Bavellas’s Greek drama “In the Strange Pursuit of Laura Durand,” about two dysfunctional men searching for the love of their life: a 90s porn star who mysteriously...