COLLECTIVE MEMORY consists of a core of people, both professionals and amateurs, who are interested in history and it's highlighting through a remarkable artistic result. It is not a group in the narrow sense of the term, as it is framed from time to time with people who participate in each project, contributing to the realization of the documentaries.

 

This is an independent group, which carries out its projects without dealing with entities that would possibly control the final result or commercialize the purpose of its projects. The goal of COLLECTIVE MEMORY is to highlight history and save oral testimonies through documented facts. After all, the group was created since its creation by people who are personally interested in the thematic areas they are dealing with.

 

The first complete work of COLLECTIVE MEMORY was the documentary "The Partisans of Athens" (2018), which presents the multifaceted EAM resistance in occupied Athens from 1941 to 1944, through 14 interviews of EAM-ELAS-EPON-OPLA fighters. The documentary premiered at the 20th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in the "Memory - History" section, while it was also screened in cinemas, squats, political and other venues before being freely distributed.

 

The baton was taken up by the team's second documentary, "Newborn Sky: Women in the Democratic Army of Greece" (2021), which premiered at the 23rd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival participating in the "Open Horizons" section to follow a similar course as "The Partisans of Athens" did.

 

In the mindset of the group, the documentaries are firstly screened freely in venues or squats, giving a message against social isolation and the forgetting of history. Our experience has shown that through the screenings the documentaries provide fertile ground for the exchange of views and thoughts about history, solidarity, struggles etc. Once this cycle of screenings is completed, then it is the group's choice to distribute them freely on the internet, as their implementation is done with the financial and moral help of the public, as also because we believe that access to history should be free for all.
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