Beyond Borders 9th Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival, Kastellorizo, Greece, 25 August–1 September 2024

Beyond Borders Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival takes place on a remote Greek island, which lies on the cusp of Turkey in the easternmost point of the Aegean Sea. Unique in its isolated location, the festival is delivered with a principle of quality over quantity, creating a micro-community for film industry connections and programmes. The festival provides a platform for documentary filmmakers across all career stages to screen their work and partake in cross-cultural dialogues. The Ninth Edition of the festival (August–September 2024) draws on themes of displacement and resilience, showcasing a diverse range of films, many of which spotlight stories of marginalized groups. Helmed by the vision of the festival’s charismatic and altruistic director Irini Sarioglou, the programme is unique in its cultivation of cross-cultural industry connections, with a parallel mission to contribute to Kastellorizo’s economic and cultural development. This review highlights the ongoing ambitions of the festival, emphasized through evolving programming initiatives and the thematic focus of the 2024 iteration, as well as the apparent incongruence with some of the festival’s practices. Considering director Christos Adrianopoulos’s critique of the organization, which recognized a contradiction between the festival’s overarching values and avoidance of public statements regarding Israel’s war on Gaza, this review considers the responsibility of film festivals as influential and public-facing cultural bodies.