Director Manos Zakharias was honored at a special ceremony on Monday November 17th, in the context of the TIFF’s retrospective to his work. The ceremony took place at Tonia Marketaki theater which was filled with friends and fans of the great filmmaker. Among them were the director’s life-time partner Liolia and his daughter Lena, who both received a flower bouquet from TIFF’s president Georges Corraface as an honor for their contribution to the work of Mr. Zakharias. TIFF director Despina Mouzaki underlined the importance of Manos Zakharias’ work. ‘Manos Zakharias is an inspired and educated filmmaker with consistent moral values, who worked with some of the greatest Russian directors. Today we are honoring Manos Zakharias as a man, a friend, an artist and a man of vision with an unappeased passion for cinema who pays his dues to humanity’. ‘The one thing I keep from honorary ceremonies is people’s honesty, something that I find deeply touching’, the director commented and then spoke briefly about the screening of the film that took place after the ceremony. ‘At the Corner of Arbat and Bubulinas Street is the most personal of all my movies since it includes a lot of biographical elements. Throughout the film I tried to introduce a different perspective of certain events of modern Greek history’. A close friend of Manos Zakharias, director Fotos Lamprinos said: ‘I feel that I am connected with bonds of blood with Manos, and I feel deeply moved when speaking about him because we know each other since October 1964 when I was studying in Moscow. During my stay there, I spent most of my time in his house and the main topic of our discussions was the progress of the U.S.S.R. since I also had a communist background. Through our talks, different views were revealed to me by Manos; views related more to morality than politics. This is an element that defines his work. Although he was engaged to the Left as a youth, he examines the moral substance of things in his films’.
