A new documentary exploring the traumatic history of the Sephardic Jewish community in northern Greece is set to premiere at the 28th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Titled "Moving Forward," the film by American director Caroline Kay draws on three decades of family storytelling to reconstruct a past shaped by war, displacement, and survival.
The 81-minute documentary centres on Carolina Varón, Kay's grandmother, whose escape from Nazi-occupied Greece during the Second World War profoundly altered the course of her life and that of her descendants. Through Varón's story, the film traces the broader fate of the Sephardic Jews of Kavala and Drama, communities that were almost annihilated during the Holocaust.
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The narrative begins with the family's roots in Kavala and Drama during the Bulgarian occupation of eastern Macedonia and Thrace, then follows their escape to Volos, which was under Italian control at the time. The film also reflects on the consequences of their eventual return and the long shadow cast by war and persecution.
Rare personal accounts describe memories of the 1941 Drama massacre and the deportation trains that carried Jews from the region to the Treblinka extermination camp in northern Poland. Kay weaves together personal testimony, recovered archival material, and distinctive artistic elements such as embroidery, handmade maps, and collage. These visual techniques attempt to reconstruct fragments of memory and lost archives, revealing, as the director describes, the emotional cost of survival.
Kay shares with Voria.gr the project's origins: "In 1943, my grandfather asked my grandmother to follow him to Volos, where he was hiding with his family. When I began the research, I was drawn to their love story, a wartime romance that saved my grandmother. [...] However, as I researched further, I became captivated by the concept of identity. What interests did the Bulgarians have in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace? How did Christians from Asia Minor and Jews from Kavala and Drama perceive what it meant to be 'Greek'?"
"This shift in identity recurred repeatedly within my family, initially following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and later during the Balkan Wars, World War II, and their migration to the United States. [...] These ideas are not so different from the discussions we are having worldwide today."
The documentary, which features English, Greek, and Ladino, will have its world premiere on 9 March at the Frida Liappa cinema hall in Thessaloniki's port venue. Kay says she finds it particularly meaningful that the film debuts in northern Greece, close to where her family's story began. "In a way, it is a tribute to those people, but in another sense I think: 'we are still here'," she says.
Through the story of the Alhanati family, the film ultimately explores a question that continues to resonate today: how do people define "home" and belonging when the world around them offers no stable ground?
By Maria Ritzaleou - adapted from Greek by Vassia Barba
