Grigoris Vallianatos
Acting
Biography
He was born in 1956 in Plaka, Athens, originally from Vallianata, Kefalonia. He studied Political Science. He has worked as a journalist and as a communications consultant. During his studies in London he worked as a gentleman's attendant. He has declared that he is gay, HIV-positive and an atheist. On April 11, 2005, he suffered a beating, in Kolonaki square, by the criminologist Alexis Kougia, due to an earlier dispute between them, due to statements made by Grigoris Vallianatos against Alexis Kougia on a television show. In 2001, he participated in the film Pink at Full Speed and in 2005 in the film Homer. In 2008, the book Inappropriate was published by Kastaniotis publications. It stands for the individual liberties of LGBT+ people, immigrants and refugees, substance abusers, sex workers, Jews, women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, the imprisoned and the homeless.
Known For
Twenty-year-old homosexual Angelos, who works in a jewelry shop, lives very discreetly in a rather hostile social environment. When he falls in love with a sailor, Michalis, he decides to leave home, abandoning his alcoholic father, his hysterical mother and his disabled sister, to live with his lover.
Angel
Inspired by the real-life story of a bus hijacking in Northern Greece, HOSTAGE explores the sensitive issue of Greek-Albanian relations through a young Albanian who takes over an intercity bus. Upon hijacking the bus, he takes the seven passengers hostage and demands a ransom of half and million euro, and safe passage to his homeland of Albania. Surrounded by police, the bus trundles towards the Albanian border and the tension mounts until the final harrowing conclusion.
Hostage
A muck raker journalist tries to trap the Education Minister, why is rumored to be gay, but he perceived as gay. Dismissed from his job, but becomes the idol of all sexually oppressed. Forced to represent the gay, he decides to establish "alternative" party with the former minister, who represents his lover for electioneering purposes.
Full Pink Ahead
Greece, 1977. A proposed law brings gay men and “transvestites” together in a historic event and sparks the creation of the first Greek LGBT movement. For the next 13 years, AKOE and its magazine Amfi, would define the way LGBT Greeks think about themselves. This film celebrates their story and legacy.
AKOE/AMFI: The Story of a Revolution (*Just to sleep on their chest…)
In the year 2008, the mayor of the island of Tilos in the Aegean Sea agreed to perform the first gay and lesbian civil marriages ever held in Greece. The film follows the story of these two civil marriages through visual material that was shot ad hoc, but also through footage from the Gay Pride of the same year, Press conferences and other demonstrations regarding the same topic.
Tilos Weddings
A look at “Greek love” and the reality of homosexuality in Greece in 1991. Leaders of the once-called GLBT movement (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender) or simply people who dared to stand in front of the camera and speak about their lives, paint us a clear portrait – a bigger picture that might not have changed much in the last three decades.