The Greek Directors Guild (GDG) was founded in 1973 in Athens. It is the artistic and professional association of screen, theatre, and television directors. In 2001, the first branch was created in Thessaloniki. Currently, our Guild represents more than 1,400 Greek directors. The main administrative body of the guild is a nine-member Board of Directors that serves a three-year term.
The Greek Directors Guild is a member of the Federation of European Screen Directors (FERA) and the International Federation of Trade Unions of Audio-Visual Workers (UNI-MEI).
Our goal is to unite screen, theatre, and television directors, promote domestic and international artistic production in these fields and defend directors’ professional and social rights.
To accomplish our goals, we have been active since 1973, providing our members with legal protection and moral support and defending their freedom of speech and their rights to unionise against any anti-democratic, censorial, or anti-labour practices wherever they may derive from.
We seek to cultivate meaningful relationships with organisations and federations, domestic or foreign, with similar goals and support audiovisual arts education. Overall, we promote a fundamental reformation of the directors’ culture and education.
We are in constant communication with individuals and institutions responsible for matters that concern the film, theatre, radio, television, and multimedia industries; festivals, film and theatre education, state grant programs, film importation and distribution. We regularly inform the media and state officials of our members' opinions and claims. We also provide proposals as we seek to make valuable contributions to shaping the fields mentioned above.
During the last fifteen years, we have taken on some critical initiatives in the cultural field to support Greek directors. We managed to create two TV shows for national television and one for the Hellenic Parliament TV; members of our guild are exclusively responsible for directing the episodes.
In 2019, we organised for the first time the "No Budget Films Festival", a celebration of quality cinematography created with very low or no budget at all. The festival wasn’t competitive, and film screenings were free. In 2020 we organised the Festival of Young Documentary Filmmakers "Moments of Truth", where 22 recently released documentaries (both short and feature-length) competed for three awards. Through the festival, we intended to promote and support documentary production, a genre that has been flourishing in recent years but isn't as distributed as it deserves.
In 2021, we took on the aspiring initiative to create a digital platform, the Greek Directors Database, to promote the artistic work and the vision of our community’s members nationally and internationally.
Throughout all these years, our members' active participation has given us the strength and inspiration to continue fighting.
