The Anafi International Film Festival returns for its 4th edition, asking us: “How Soon Is Now?”

The Anafi International Film Festival returns for its fourth edition, taking place from June 18 to 24 on the island of Anafi, continuing to shape a vibrant meeting point between contemporary independent cinema, artistic research, and the local community.

How Soon Is Now?

Under the central theme “How Soon Is Now?”, this year’s festival approaches the present as a condition of constant acceleration and transition, exploring the social, political, and existential conditions that shape contemporary experience.

The programme features screenings of international and Greek short films across fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental cinema, alongside curated sections that highlight emerging cinematic voices and new narrative forms.

Perhaps searching for lost time, but also for the ways in which past, present, and future coexist and interact, the Anafi International Film Festival returns for its fourth edition, turning this year its focus toward our relationship with the now. Approaching the present not as something fixed or self-evident, but as a field of experiences, contradictions, and possibilities in constant formation, the festival unfolds at a moment marked by uncertainty, but also by the urgent need to imagine the future differently. This year’s edition seeks works that engage with contemporary reality, with the forces that shape us, as well as with what we may still claim and reclaim. Searching for utopias while attempting to challenge the dystopias that seem to define our era, the festival poses a seemingly simple yet essential question: how soon is now, really?

Main Programmes

Through six main programmes, this year’s edition develops a thematic landscape touching on memory and dreams, desire and queer intimacy, the relationship between body and image in the digital age, mechanisms of control, as well as forms of spirituality and connections with the environment. These themes do not operate as closed categories, but rather as intersecting pathways, allowing the personal to meet the political and the familiar to converse with the uncanny.

Through these trajectories, the programme engages with questions of desire, identity, care, survival, and collective memory, while also opening space for films that look toward technology, transformation, ritual, and landscape as carriers of experience. Once again, part of the programme is dedicated to the critical geopolitical issues permeating our present and the ways in which these are inscribed both in collective and personal experience. Through diverse cinematic voices and approaches, these themes run throughout the programme as part of a broader inquiry into how we experience the now.

Parallel Sections

Alongside the six main programmes, this year’s edition also develops a series of parallel sections featuring special screenings, performances, discussions, and events that expand the festival beyond the cinematic space itself. For the first time this year, the programme also includes VR works in collaboration with Poetics, opening the festival toward more expanded and immersive forms of cinematic experience.

As every year, the Anafi festival does not function merely as a hosting location, but as an artistic platform, a landscape that actively shapes the ways in which screenings, discussions, and the experience of cinema itself unfold.

Workshops | Finale | Screenings

A central part of this year’s edition is once again dedicated to workshops, returning as spaces of exchange, experimentation, and collective learning. Through workshops connecting cinematic practice with questions of image, narration, body, and place, the festival continues to invest in participatory actions that create room for shared thought and creation.

This year’s edition will conclude with the closing film Gorgoná by Evi Kalogiropoulou, a work that meaningfully resonates with many of the programme’s core concerns around the body, transformation, myth, and survival, functioning as a natural culmination of the paths opened by this year’s edition.

The fourth edition of the Anafi International Film Festival continues to approach cinema as a space of encounter, dialogue, and exploration. A space where we may stand together before the tensions of the present, while also imagining what else might become possible. And perhaps return, once more, to the same question from another angle: how long does a moment we call “now” truly last?

Screenings take place in open-air and site-specific locations across the island, transforming Anafi’s natural and social landscape into an active part of the cinematic experience.

Beyond the Screenings

AnafiFF 2026 unfolds as a multilayered artistic environment that includes:

– workshops and masterclasses in cinema, photography, and performance
– public talks and Q&As with artists and filmmakers
– site-specific performances and music events
– participatory activities with the local community
– walking and archival practices across the island

A central role is once again held by the research programme “Show Me Your Place”, which explores the relationship between place, memory, and identity through collective artistic processes and the active participation of local residents.

The research and curatorial programme “Show Me Your Place” is a collaboration between the Anafi International Film Festival (ANAFIFF) and the artistic collective ASTRO, based on a site-responsive methodology designed by Raisa Desypri.

Shortly before the festival begins, Anafi is already activated through the group exhibition “ENTOPOLOGIO: Local Narratives of Anafi”, taking place from May 30 to June 24.

The exhibition opens on May 30 at the old school building of Anafi, followed by a cine-panigyri at the upper square, activating public space and collective experience from the very first moment. Participating artists include Katerina Markoulaki, Antigoni Papantoni, Vasileia Sofroniou, and Kanela Petropoulou, developed in co-design with the Anafi community, curated by Raisa Desypri and produced by Stelios Christoforou.

As part of the exhibition, an open programme of events (May 30 – June 2) will also take place, functioning as an initial gathering of artists, residents, and visitors, preparing the ground for the festival itself.

“ENTOPOLOGIO” focuses on place as a field of narration and lived experience, highlighting the stories, memories, and everyday routes of Anafi through contemporary artistic practices.

In this way, the exhibition does not function as a parallel event, but as an extension of the festival itself — a gradual entrance into a shared space of image, memory, and presence.

The programme was implemented with the support of the Athina I. Martinou Foundation through the “Points of Support” programme of the Bodossaki Foundation.