FNC co-founder saw film differently
Festival du nouveau cinéma co-founder Dimitri Eipides died Jan. 6, at the age of 82. The lifelong cinephile and internationally known film programmer, who had not lived in Montreal for over three decades, was a soft-spoken man known as a passionate defender of film as art. He died in his hometown of Athens, Greece, following a long illness.
Eipides opened Montreal's Underground Film Centre (later known as Cinéma Parallèle) with Dimitri Spentzos, on St-laurent Blvd. in 1967. The two parted ways a year later, and Eipides was joined by a gregarious young film buff named Claude Chamberlan.
Eipides and Chamberlan took over the Underground Film Centre, and in 1969 sought and got the support of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, during their Bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
In 1971, Eipides and Chamberlan launched the Festival international du cinéma en 16mm, renamed the Festival du nouveau cinéma in 1980. It became Montreal's auteur film festival par excellence, attracting rising stars including Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Agnieszka Holland, Frederick Wiseman, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Peter Greenaway and Chantal Ackerman.
Along the way, Eipides taught film history at Loyola College and Mcgill University.
He left Montreal and the Festival du nouveau cinéma, in 1988, to become a programmer for Toronto's Festival of Festivals (now TIFF).
At the time, program director Piers Handling (who in 2018 retired as TIFF CEO and executive director) praised his commitment to bringing new, independent cinema to North America.
Eipides worked out of Athens, and specialized in film fare from Eastern Europe, Western and Central Asia, and Greece. He remained at TIFF until 2018. He stayed on as co-director of the FNC until 1994, when a change of festival dates led to a standoff between him and Chamberlan. He returned to the event a decade later, as a programmer.
“I learned everything from him, how to see cinema differently,” Chamberlan told the Montreal Gazette, in 2015.
Eipides kept busy in Greece, serving as artistic director of the New Horizons section at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and founding the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
He also served as program director at the Reykjavik Film Festival, and served on juries at international festivals including San Sebastian, Istanbul, Tehran, Moscow, Seoul, Karlovy Vary, Amsterdam and Bilbao.
Handling, in a statement, praised Eipides as “a pure, gentle soul and one of the most committed programmers and cinephiles I have ever known. … It was through him that I met (filmmakers) Béla Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Theo Angelopoulos, Cristian Mungiu, Abbas Kiarostami and Goran Paskaljevic, just to name a few of the modern icons of cinema.”