Athens is featured in the book «The World Film Locations». It is a true treasure for film buffs and world travelers alike. With each book dedicated to a different international city and edited by a film scholar specializing in the cinematic wonders of that specific city, every entry in the series offers readers a passionate and in-depth look at some of the world’s most enchanting cultural capitals and how they have contributed to the world of film. 

To date, the series has covered Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, New York, Dublin, Paris, Mandrid, Instanbul, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Vienna, Reykjavik, Berlin, Mumbai, Melbourne, Helsinki, Chicago, Glasglow, Marseilles, Vancouver, Venice, Glasgow, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Prague, Liverpool, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Boston, Toronto, Shanghai, Moscow, Rome, Havanna, Syndney, Buenos Aires, Sigapore, Beijing, Washington D.C., and Florence.

Every page is packed with illustrations, city maps, or location photographs, and the carefully chosen movie stills from an elastic mix of films are accompanied by brief but insightful texts. The real value of these books, however, is in the essays covering the themes, directors, and key historical periods that relate directly and intimately to the city.

World Film Locations: Athens  is edited by Anna Poupou, Afroditi Nikolaidou, and Eirini Sifaki. This time of crisis, however, coincides with a vibrant time for Athen filmmaking in which the work of a new generation of filmmakers, often labeled the “Greek New Wave”, have projected a “kind of urban nostalgia”. In their selection of essays, the editors seem to have set out to highlight this “constant comparison between the present and the past of the city”.

In fact, Poupou and Sifaki begin the book with “Athens: City of the Imagination”, in which they provide an overview of how the city of Athens has been represented in film over time. They point out how international films have tended to focus on the “stereotypical topics of antiquity and tourism, dealing with the rediscovery of its ancient values and heritage,” while Greek cinema has projected Athens as a city that is in a constant state of transformation with films “about urban reconstruction and demolition, destruction and regeneration, political mutations and crisis.”