Curator and Johan Wagenaar Prize laureate Calliope Tsoupaki opens this festival day with True to Our Inner Daemon, from her native Greece. Filmmaker Tassos Gkoletsos will be present for an after‑talk with Calliope and the audience.

Somewhere between realism and magic, ordinary people long for a miracle. Instinctively, they throw themselves into acts of reconciliation and seek a moment of freedom so addictive that they want to experience it again and again. In that moment of ecstasy, they stop thinking and simply live. An experience of Greek paganism, gasping for breath at the edge of the modern world.

True to Our Inner Daemon, forged from the materials and myths of these rituals, explores an archetypal process in which the transition from life to death forms a fundamental axis running through the meaning of the ritual. This is a film not meant to be described, but to be experienced. Through a purely observational approach, Tassos Gkoletsos offers the viewer no instructions; instead, he invites them to surrender to the rhythm of the ceremony and ultimately to take part in it. And even when the experience feels frightening, it is always purifying.