ArteKino Festival 2026

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Most of ArteKino happens on a screen at home. The European film festival of ARTE, the Franco-German cultural channel, streams its selection through arte.tv and the ARTE Cinéma YouTube channel while screenings run in cities around Europe. ArteKino Festival 2026 in Athens, from 20 to 22 November 2026, takes the opposite route on the Small Stage of the Onassis Stegi: three films, each shown with its filmmaker in the room.

The festival's wider slate this year gathers 12 European films shot in seven languages: French, German, English, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Romanian. It follows the tenth edition in December 2025, when ARTE streamed twelve features and documentaries free for a month and viewers voted for a European Audience Award.

The three Athens titles share a pull toward loss, fear and the ways people hold on to one another. Emilie Aussel's L'Été l'éternité (Our Eternal Summer), her first feature, released in France in 2021 and shot in Marseille, follows 18-year-olds on the city's beaches whose summer breaks when one of them drowns; the film has no adult characters. Actress Louise Chevillotte makes her directing debut with Si nous habitons un éclair, a 77-minute documentary shown at FID Marseille in July 2025. After her mother's death on 4 September 2021, she found in her mother's last diary a line by the poet René Char, "If we inhabit a flash of lightning, it is the heart of the eternal," and turned it into an investigation. Sergio Oksman's Una película de miedo (A Scary Movie), a Spanish-Portuguese co-production that opened the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the 73rd San Sebastián festival, follows a documentary filmmaker and his 12-year-old son through a summer in an abandoned Lisbon hotel that recalls The Shining, where ghost stories meet the shadow of Portugal's first serial killer.

The programme is built for viewers who stay for the conversation after the credits: documentary followers, people who make films themselves, and a crowd curious about how a debut gets from diary page to screen.

The setting is the Small Stage rather than the Stegi's main auditorium, which keeps each screening at the scale of a talk. The mood swings from Marseille summer light to a daughter's grief to a father-and-son horror game. Each film plays with its director present, and the three filmmakers also join a masterclass on the experience of making their films.

If you want a festival marathon of dozens of titles, ArteKino in Athens is three films across three days, with the rest of the lineup living online. But if you want to hear a director explain a film you have just watched, this is a limited, three-day chance at the Onassis Stegi.

The Onassis Stegi is at Syngrou Avenue 107-109 in Neos Kosmos, a 12-minute walk from Syngrou-Fix metro station, and the Panteion bus stop sits beside the building. Screening times and tickets for ArteKino Festival 2026 are on tickets.onassis.org.

The lineup streams online; the people who made these three films are in Athens only from 20 to 22 November.