Biography

Fotos Lambrinos was a graduate of the Moscow Film Institute (1965-1970) in the workshop of Mikhail Romm. He worked as a director in radio and theater, as well as as a film critic in the newspapers Avgi and Demokratiki Allagi. He also directed many documentaries and the feature films: Aris Velouchiotis – the dilemma (1981), Doxombous (1987), Birthday Party or A Silent Balkan Story (1995), Captain Kemal, the Comrade (2007), The Great Utopia (2017). He extensively researched, in collaboration with Costas Gavras, Nikos Svoronos and Dimitris Despotidis, the international newsreel film archives in Europe and the USA, which helped in the subsequent production of the Panorama of the Century series (1982-1987) for ERT. He contributed to the establishment of the film archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and collaborated as a documentarian with the National Audiovisual Archive. He has taught "Relations between cinema and history" at the Universities of Crete, Thessaly and Panteion. He was responsible for ERT's program for international documentary co-productions (History Doc) and has published texts on Greek and Balkan cinema in foreign publications (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995; La Biennale di Venezia, 2000) and domestic publications (History of Modern Hellenism, volumes 6-10, Greek Letters, Athens 1993). He has translated Chekhov, Camilleri and Tsvetaeva. Kastaniotis Publications publishes his books: My Power is the Love of the Lens – Cinematic Current Events as Evidence of History (1895-1940) (2005), White Shoshanas (2006), Is It a Junta? Will It Pass? – The film Current Affairs during the Dictatorship, 1967-1974 (2013) and Palamidiou 10 (2019), which gave us the occasion for the following discussion.