Ray Pride samples the International Thessaloniki Film Festival’s documentary offerings at “Images of the Twenty-first Century”.

Thessaloniki, a city of just under a million in the north of Greece, is an unlikely locale for two major film festivals, but in the past six years the longstanding International Thessaloniki Film Festival of November has been augmented by March’s “Images of the Twenty-first Century.” As curated by Dimitri Eipides, the veteran programmer of the New Horizons section for both the Toronto International Festival and the November Thessaloniki event, it’s a standout showcase of committed voices and social-issue documentaries.

Many titles have shown at the growing number of festivals devoted to docs, or have since opened in North America, such as Control Room, The Corporation, Los Angeles Plays Itself (an especial favorite of my Greek friends), Lost Boys of Sudan, The Weather Underground, My Flesh and Blood, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Capturing the Friedmans and The Same River Twice. Yet the concentrated viewing in a single week, with mostly sold-out shows to the student-heavy population of this cosmopolitan port city, was heartening.

The program is divided into sections, like the bill of fare of the many small plates that keep coming at Greek fish tavernas or the corner ouzaria. While the festival was segmented into themes like “Views of the World,” “Stories to Tell” and “Habitat,” the programmers’ perspicacity in choosing their overarching topical theme for the event was painfully prescient. The events were delayed a week because of Greek elections, and thus began four days after the Madrid bombings that left 192 people dead. The Story of the Weeping Camel provided pungent emotion for the opening-night crowd without directly referencing the present moment. There were 13 films on terrorism, with 13 films and several conferences slotted — especially topical with the Greek Olympics coming in late summer.

Tributes were offered to 63-year-old Swedish firebrand Stefan Jarl, who was on hand to present his self-embargoed collaboration with Lukas Moodysson, Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced, interviews with articulate young activists incarcerated for years after being convicted of rock throwing in Göteburg in 2001. Jarl’s master class for local students showed him to be a lifelong profane firebrand. His earlier Modstrilogie, with three films covering the sorrows of 25 years in the life of several friends Jarl met when they were carefree teens, are little-seen gems. Heddy Honigmann was honored for her warm docs like Crazy and The Underground Orchestra.

In the midst of a thriving market for European buyers, a few hardy souls like Artistic License’s Sande Zeig made their way east. The market-viewing area was perpetually packed, with journalists, buyers and filmmakers mingling. Another section held a couple of small docs about Abbas Kiarostami to illuminate his work and a cornucopia stuffed full of seven docs about the making of local elder Theo Angelopoulos’s Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow. I watched them all, and it’s a strange meta-movie experience, with different perspectives on the same topics and epic set-building.

A documentary about the 40-year-plus history of the international festival held Zelig moments in crowd shots for this regular visitor: “Ooh, that 2001 beard — bad idea”; “Did my hair look like that in 2002?”

But the movies — and conversations — were seldom trivial. Another revelation was Yoav Shamir’s rigorous Checkpoint, which has gone on to greater glory at Hot Docs and other events, a series of absurdist vignettes shot between 2001 and 2003 at key checkpoints like Ramallah, Hebron, Jenin and the Gaza Strip. Oscar winner Jon Blair’s ambitious four-part heat-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants 2002 British television series The Age of Terror, raised questions rather than answer them, and Blair was a splendid kibbitzer throughout the festival. Most important, however, was another form of cross-cultural conversation. Like other great getaway festivals, Thessaloniki’s late-night banter is priceless, such as one memorable post-Checkpoint conversation in the festival’s Room With a View bar that included Shamir, Blair and The Corporation’s Mark Achbar sharing generous notes on interview techniques.