Exile Room is a non-profit organization based in downtown Athens. Established in 2009, it offers inspiration and education to established and aspiring filmmakers, as well as anyone who’s open to exploring the power of documentary. In the past 10 years we have built a dedicated following by offering free documentary screenings twice a month, complemented by masterclasses and workshops. We also run social outreach programs in the city, in prisons and remote areas of Greece. We believe documentary is an excellent way to build community: once you get to know your neighbours’ stories they cease to be strangers, paving the way for collaboration and mutual understanding.

  • VALERIE KONTAKOS

    Founder, producer / director

    A native New Yorker, she moved to Athens in 2003. After graduating from the NYU film school, she worked as a sound editor on the Maysles brothers’ Emmy award winner “Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic”, Sundance contender “Ozawa” and Deborah Dickson’s “Francis Steloff: Memoirs of a Bookseller”. She worked on Anita Thacher's experimental films “Loose Corner”, “One Art” and “To the Top”, all of which screened at the New York Film Festival. In 1989 she directed her first feature documentary “A Quality of Light”. In 1994 she became the deputy director of the Hellenic Foundation in NYC, where she started the NYC Greek Film Festival and curated a monthly program for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. She was an adjunct professor of film at Queens College from 1993-2002. Her second feature, “Who’s on First?” (2006), aired in the US, Greece, Finland and South Korea. Her third feature, “Mana” (2015), went viral during the 2018 wildfires in Greece, helping the nuns featured in it rebuild their orphanage. She founded production company Exile Films in Athens in 2007, initially producing doc series for national Greek broadcaster ERT before expanding to other realms. She is on the Board of Directors of the Greek Cinematheque since 2011, and has been operating non-profit Exile Room, focusing on social outreach through documentary, since 2009.
  • DESPINA PAVLAKI

    General coordination, fundraising, documentary production

    She was born in Athens, where she studied Communication & Mass Media, followed by a Masters in Creative Documentary at the Autonoma University of Barcelona. She worked as a journalist and festival programmer for 10 years before getting involved in production. Her film criticism and creative non-fiction was published in some of the country's top film magazines, newspapers and online publications. Her travel writing has appeared in Monocle, Yatzer and the Louis Vuitton city guides. Her writing credits also include children's book "The Vegetarian Jackal". She was the programming director of the Athens International Film Festival and the general coordinator of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, while co-organizing other festivals in Greece and abroad. She started producing documentaries for Exile Films in 2010. Her credits include “Volta” (2013) by Stella Kyriakopoulos, the first Greek short to screen in competition at Sundance, which toured more than 75 festivals and garnered awards worldwide. She has been a leading member of non-profit Exile Room since 2009. In 2017 she designed and coordinated “Tell Me Your Story”, the first educational program in the country to ever train male inmates to shoot their own short documentaries while in captivity.
  • THANASIS PATSAVOS

    Project management, communication, film curation

    Born in Athens in 1979, he studied Communication &Mass Media and has worked in almost every aspect of the filmmaking industry, from background actor work to film distribution, before he decided to focus on writing and curating film-related events. He has worked as a film journalist and critic for both print and online media (mixtape.gr, SONIK, tospirto.net, Time Out Athens, ΒΗΜΑMEN, cinemagazine.gr), and has also collaborated on official publications issued by the MEDIA Desk Hellas and the Greek Film Center. For many years he was editor-in-chief at the most renowned Greek film publication, CINEMA magazine. Around the same time, and for more than ten years, he worked as a film programmer at the Athens International Film Festival. Most recently he has been writing articles and reviews for the online film magazine Flix.gr, between 2016 and 2019. He has been an integral part of non-governmental organization Exile Room for the past 7 years, where he has been curating documentary screenings (an unconventional film festival that runs throughout the year) and organizing educational and other cultural programs that use documentary as a tool for social awareness. He has also curated film events and programs for other organization, like the Greek Film Archive, the Onassis Cultural Center and the Terre di Confine Festival in Sardinia, Italy.
  • IOANNA GIAKOUMATOU

    Educational programs

    Born and raised in Athens, she studied at the Music School of Ilion, before graduating from the department of Audiovisual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She completed her post-graduate degree in Information and Communication Technologies for Education at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She currently teaches Visual Media in Educational Practice at Akto College’s MA Art & Education and heads experiential workshops in stop-motion animation and audiovisual media for adults, educators and special groups (disabled, adult detoxification and dexterity groups, adult groups in prisons). In the past few years, she has been coordinating educational programs, while also working in animation production. Through teaching, she explores the possibilities of integrating audiovisual arts and ICT into the educational process as a tool for cooperation, learning and development. Her spare time is largely taken up by documentary, animation and educational practices.