When Cannes was merely a mosquito -infested fishing village, Thessa-loniki was home to the Macedonian navy, the harbor from which Alexander conquered half the world. But while it is certainly filled with remnants of its imperial past, Thessaloniki is now very much a rich European port city, in the vein of Trieste or Genoa.

The festival, one of Europe's oldest, has had a checkered history. Fairly significant through the late 1960s, when Michael Cacoyannis and Jules Dassin were making Irene Pappas and Melina Mercouri major international glamour queens, the festival a few years later convulsed into a merely local event, with no films or artists from outside Greek borders.

In 1992, the Competition was revamped and new director Michael Demopoulos hired legendary programmer Dimitri Eipides - recent recipient of a FIPRESCI prize for his "contribution to the promotion of independent cinema" - to curate a large concurrent program of new international cinema. "New Horizons," Eipides' creation, is an unqualified success with the public. With its emphasis on young filmmakers and work from unusual corners of the world, the program has brought an enthusiastic crowd into the theaters. They brave the brisk autumn weather and electronic subtitling. They even applaud at the end which, according to Eipides, "is not at all normal for Greeks."

He sees the festival able to offer much to visiting filmmakers. "While we don't aspire to become a market, Greek distributors use this event to acquire films for theatrical distribution and television. From the beginning, more difficult films have been bought out of the New Horizons section. When I began here, Atom Egoyan's work was unknown in Greece; he has since visited twice and his films have done consistently well in theatrical release and on tv."

Eipides sees the festival as "helping to promote and market new films for the emerging Balkan market, while sustaining the intellectual film culture that has taken root here." Rob Epstein, co-director of The Celluloid Closet, enjoyed being "fully and completely a guest of the festival without having to do a lot of business... It was interesting to be at a festival with so few North Americans and American films. Besides, it's a sweet town; everything takes place in a twenty-block radius - and it's full of beautiful men."

Eipides, a consistent defender of gay cinema, did however make one programming miscue. Frisk, Todd Verow's controversial meditation on sexuality and violence was screened as aspecial, unannounced "sneak preview." Eipides was forced into this position by the demands of Berlin's Forum section for a blackout of prior European press. But, considering the volatile reactions after the screenings in San Francisco and Toronto, the response was predictably homophobic, with gobs of peanuts being lobbed at on-screen gay sex.

Says Eipides: "In my estimation it's a good film and good cinema. We had to keep it secret because of Berlin, but without a description it was difficult to inform viewers. In the end, I think a small minority were aggressive and vocal against it; some were very positive. In the end, these things add to the vitality of the cinema. Participation of any kind is interesting." His statement is somewhat borne out by the positive reactions to challenging Competition entries, such as the psycho-sexual Irish drama Guiltrip and Karim Dridi's insider look at Marseille racial tension, Bye-bye. French filmmaker Claude Mourieras' gentle, affecting Sale Grosse, already the big cash winner at San Sebastian, was also well liked, as were Chinese festival veterans Ning Ying's On the Beat and He Jianjun's Postman.

New Horizons' success stories included Celluloid Closet, Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, Bent Hamer's loopy Norwegian drama, Eggs, and an austere, beautiful Japanese elegy on the difficulties of coming to terms with personal loss, Maborosi no hikari.

Less popular but wonderfully fulfilling were the festival's retrospectives. While saluting Krzysztof Kieslowski, Nanni Moretti, Michael Cacoyannis and new Iranian cinema all in one year seems a bit excessive, they supplied endless riches to attending cinephiles. Of course, films like Moretti's Sogni D'oro or Kieslowski's Amator, both brilliantly nasty, brutally self-reflexive satires on the authoritarian nature of filmmaking, make you question the comparative ability of the current directorial crop.

International Thessaloniki Film Festival
Festival Internazionale Giovanni
Toronto International Film Festival
Montreal World Film Festival
V'iennale