Mpampis Aktsoglou

Babis Aktsoglou was born in 1954 in Thessaloniki. After completing his film studies in Paris, he collaborated with magazines such as "Othoni," "Film," "Cinema," "Progressive Cinema," as well as with "Cinematic Notebooks," which he founded alongside a group of cinema enthusiasts from Thessaloniki. After 1987, he worked exclusively with the magazine "Athinorama." He wrote monographs on directors (Hitchcock, Polanski, Coppola, Losey), as well as a study on Westerns. He curated the publication "Le cinema grec" (Centre Georges Pompidou), as well as various books for the Thessaloniki Film Festival (Tzavellas, Chabrol, Dreyer, Buñuel, Imamura, Mizoguchi, Almodóvar, Winterbottom, Serreau, Wenders, Švankmajer, among others). He served, for consecutive periods, as the programming director of the "Filmcenter" cinema network of the Greek Film Center. Additionally, he was a co-founder of the "Clip Art" store chain. He passed away in Athens in the early hours of Thursday, January 18, 2007, at the age of 52, due to cardiac arrest during a scheduled hospitalization at the Red Cross Hospital. In the announcement of his passing by "Athinorama" magazine, it was noted: "The world of cinema, criticism, thought, culture, and his thousands of readers have lost a valuable individual who was a reference point for Greek journalism over the past twenty years. Babis Aktsoglou is no longer with us. The 'Athinorama' family mourns the sudden loss of its beloved member. [...] For Babis, cinema was not just a professional pursuit; it was a matter of life. He did not care for grand words, but his readers could easily discern behind his critiques his deep and multifaceted culture, his extensive and profound knowledge of cinema, and - above all - his unwavering defense of cinema as more than just a consumer product. Always objective in his criticism, he repeatedly dared to go against the trends of the time. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Babis Aktsoglou's critique, you were always certain it was an honest critique, substantiated with clear criteria. It was these qualities that fostered the special, close relationship he had with the thousands of cinema friends who read his writings every week."