In collaboration with the 15th Athens International Film Festival, we are delighted to welcome the distinguished film director Peter Greenaway to Greece.

During his stay in Athens, the director will lead a masterclass on the clash between painting and cinema entitled 8,000 years of painting and 114 years of cinema come face to face in an unparalleled battle between the two art forms, which will include examples from his own audiovisual archive.

There will also be screening of his film Rembrandt’s J’Accuse; an essayistic documentary in which the audience will travel through Rembrandt's paintings into 17th century Amsterdam.

Born in Wales and educated in London, Peter Greenaway trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He now lives in Amsterdam.

Greenaway has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, and also shows his work at exhibitions and installations in galleries worldwide, including the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona, the Boymans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris.

He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang.