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Ilias Giannakakis

Ilias Giannakakis

Directing

Biography

Producer, screenwriter and director of documentaries and feature films. He has implemented more than 150 documentaries and 2 feature films, as director and screenwriter. In several cases he has been also the producer himself. He has been awarded many times for his documentaries and his feature films in international and Greek festivals. Many of his documentaries have been shown in special screenings in Greece and abroad and have been successfully distributed in the theaters and in television. Since 2000, and for more than 10 years, he had been a regular director in the famous TV documentary program Paraskinio for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT. He is specialised in the cultural (arts and literature), historical and athletic genre. In 2002 until 2003 he was advisor and reporter in a radio program for Era Spor, with the title "Mythomania", interviewing important personalities from the sports in Greece. After a long and deep research on the history and the social dimension of the athletics, he published a big essay in 2005, with the title "The Romance of the Football". In 2009 he made as director and screenwriter a documentary series for the greek broadcasting company SKAI TV, under the title "For ever Champions", on the history of football and basketball in Greece, and in 2014 a documentary series for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT, with the title "In the Fever of the World Cup", about the history of the World Cup. He has implemented over 30 documentaries on Theater and Drama, he himself being the director, the camera operator and the producer at the same time and following his subject for the whole period of the theatrical process, from the first day of the rehearsals until the premiere. History wise, he has studied a lot the period of the Second World War in Greece and the Civil War and he has made several documentaries on these matters. Apart from his main occupation as director and producer, he has also organised retrospectives and special screenings in Cinemas and Cultural Centers. Furthermore, he had been writing articles on the history of Cinema for more than 15 years. He has created and he keeps expanding a huge collection of old archive films, documentaries, feature films from all the ages of the Cinema, TV programs and interviews as well as magazines and newspapers with historical and cultural value.

Known For

Years of innocence

“Years of innocence” signifies the return to the sports memories that have been the balm of the souls of our grandparents, our fathers and those younger people who have heard the narratives or studied the photographs of the great idols of older times. We return to the age of football, when figures of the sport emerged from a completely different setting compared to that of recent years. In this day and age, now that the era of “prosperity” has lapsed into decline, looking at those figures who excelled in conditions of extreme poverty, hunger, terror and the weight of History, offers the most exciting model for today's young people. Through football, we focus on a Greece, true but not ideal, that inspired us, that was lost and which we wish to restore in order to inspire us again, in the midst of such a gloomy juncture.

Years of innocence

2022Series
Kostas Manoussakis: The Exiled Filmmaker

Costas Manoussakis traced a short but impressive trajectory in Greek cinema and, after making only three films, withdrew into isolation. It was never made clear whether this was a decision to which he had been led due to events or whether this was a peculiar form of self-exiled chosen by a true aesthete. What is certain is that during the sixties, his films, Betrayal and especially Fear, caused quite a stir. Part of the official selection at both the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, the films were box office hits in Greece and were screened in many countries all over the world. At the same time the critics unanimously proclaimed Manoussakis a great talent and a film stylist whose potential went far beyond the narrow limits of Greek cinema. But after 1966, when Fear was screened, Manoussakis never made a film again. At the age of 33 he was a retiree. The documentary looks at the case of Costas Manoussakis in its entirety.

Kostas Manoussakis: The Exiled Filmmaker

2005Movie