By Pamela Biénzobas

Could the spark born from the life-long romance between literature and cinema create a privileged light under which to see the soul of a region? If so, what would the complex Balkans look like? Through eleven films inspired on stories and novels from Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey and ex Yugoslavia (Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia), the tribute From Words to Images within the Balkan Survey section of the 2017 Thessaloniki International Film Festival (November 2 to 12) sought to seize a kind of particular soul as conveyed by the cinema of the past six decades – from 1961 (Boštjan Hladnik’s Dance in the Rain) to 2015 (Grant Gee’s Innocence of Memories), though mostly from before the mid-seventies.