If you want people to watch your documentary, there’s a sure-fire way to intice them: make it about a cute animal. Across languages and borders a love of creature comforts endures, and even when docs choose to focus on the darker side of our relationship with nature – à la Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man – the very promise of hearing a story about a unique relationship between man and beast is enough to lure viewers in. While perusing the programme for this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, this thought occurred to me as I came across the listing for Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, directed by Pippa Ehrlich who won the Oscar for Best Documentary alongside James Reed in 2020 for My Octopus Teacher. Given that Greece itself is a haven for cats, I had animals on the mind by the time I arrived in the city for the festival. Noticing quite a few different animal-centric docs in the programme, I thought this might be an interesting line of enquiry to follow for the four days I was in town.
I began with the aforementioned Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, which centers – unsurprisingly – on a tiny pangolin who is rescued during a sting operation to take down an animal trafficker. Pangolins are considered the world’s most trafficked animal, accounting for 20% of the illegal wildlife trade, which is particularly heartbreaking when you see one on screen. They are strange, alien-looking mammals, covered in scales with long, thin tongues and short arms. Pangolins are also bipedal, and many internet users have remarked how polite they look. The creatures are not helped, wildlife volunteer Gareth Thomas explains, by their lack of survival skills beyond being able to defensively curl into a ball; they have poor eyesight and no teeth. As such, when Kulu is rescued, it falls to Thomas to become his around-the-clock babysitter at a South African nature reserve until he’s big enough to be released into the wild.
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Anyone who has watched an animal documentary before will be familiar with the format of Kulu’s Journey, which brings very little to the table stylistically but plenty in the way of cute footage of a pangolin bumbling around the grasslands and bathing in mud. If the documentary’s aim is to bring awareness to the plight of the pangolin, it absolutely succeeds – Kulu is an endearing protagonist, and Thomas (a macho city escapee transformed into a sensitive zookeeper by his connection with Kulu) a servicable human counterpoint, but it’s very much in the same vain as My Octopus Teacher, and it’s easy to understand why some filmmakers may find the continued over-representation of such straight-forward storytelling – with an overreliance on cute creatures – frustrating.
But the animal action at Thessaloniki also took some interesting turns. Tomáš Elšík’s Pri zemi (Resilience) focuses on an idyllic stretch of the Czech countryside where the wildlife has started to mysteriously die. While local gardener Pavel tries to sew seeds to fight rampant deforestation, Klára (who works with the Czech Ornithological Society) tries to work out the cause of the bird deaths with help from her dogs. It’s a different sort of murder mystery, in which the sweeping vistas of the Czech landscape contrast with the image of tragically felled wildlife and the seemingly endless battle Pavel and Klára are fighting against industrialisation.
The kid-friendly Salto, Pus og den døde fisken (Small Dogs Bark Loud) by Nora Nivedita Tvedt takes a drastically different approach, giving an imagined voice to its canine (and feline) characters, chiefly Salto, the sweet Maltese who is the best friend of 12-year-old Tuni. Still grieving following the suicide of her older brother and struggling with her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, Tuni has developed a magical bond with Salto, and she puts together a summer bucket list for them to accomplish, with one big task at the end of it: visiting her brother Håkon’s grave. The chirpy V/O for Salto can be a little grating, but the conceit is quite novel, particularly for younger audiences who might otherwise not be exposed to documentary, and Small Dogs Bark Loud is a sensitive approach to the topic of grief that might well help other children experiencing similar changes. It’s also a testament to the incredible power of pets within our lives, particularly in times of crisis.
Spanish filmmaker Emilio Fonseca Martín rejects the traditional trappings in Wild, Wild, which explores the existence and absence of Iberian wolves in Galicia and Portugal through stunning imagery and the incorporation of folk history, meditating on what is lost with the relentless march of time and so-called progress. The wolves’ distant cousins appear in the most conventional but still eerie Pet Farm, in which Finn and Martin Walther spend time with Joakim in rural Norway, who has been chasing his childhood dream of breeding domesticated foxes. What starts as a harmless story about a quirky animal lover is revealed to be rooted in loneliness and isolation, as Joakim reveals just how much his foxes mean to him while the Norwegian government seeks to shut him down and cull his animals.
The tensions between humans and animals are also on display in Eliza Petkova’s Silent Observers, where six animals in the mountain village of Pirin take centre stage amid the community’s superstitions and domestic demands. Matsa the cat is accused of preventing a dead man’s soul from passing over; Gosho the horse is sick and risks euthanasia; Mila the dog is accused of murdering a neighbour’s chickens. It’s an engaging and humorous hybrid doc that encourages the audience to connect with the animals on screen rather than the humans.
Of course the TIDF programme had plenty of human stories on show – I was particularly impressed by Matylda Kawka’s My Sunnyside, which centers on Jo and Allie, a trans couple living in New York who navigate their relationship amid familial tensions and the external pressures that come with being queer in present-day America. It’s a sensitive and simple film that spotlights a community continually scapegoated both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, carefully finding plenty of joy among the difficulties in Jo and Allie’s lives. Another story of Americans on the margins, Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s Neon People, reveals the community of unhoused people that exist beneath the Las Vegas strip, living in access tunnels. It’s a candid and matter-of-fact film that allows the residents to speak plainly about their experiences and the abandonment of them by the state.
Meanwhile, the festival paid tribute to French documentarian Nicolas Philibert with a retrospective that included screenings of On the Adament and At Averroès & Rosa Parks, as well as the third and final instalment in his trilogy exploring alternative psychiatric treatment in Paris, The Typewriter and Other Headaches. In this third film, Philibert follows two handymen employed to assistant patients with various problems, such as broken typewriters and CD players and cleaning up a disorganised flat. Philibert’s naturalistic filmmaking and sense for comedic timing are on show once again here; it’s a touching and gentle film about the importance of a holistic and community-focused approach to mental health.
While cute animal protagonists might sometimes prove enough to shift tickets, it takes a skilled filmmaker to really make us invest in their art. Thessaloniki’s 2025 programme was not short of those, packed with gems of both the animal and human variety, with plenty of filmmakers keen to reach beyond the clichés of genre and find new modes of expression.
The 27th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival took place from 6 to 16 March. The Thessaloniki Film Festival will take place later this year.
