The Promotion
2012. Nikos lives in Athens. He is a film director who teaches film direction at the University of Thessaloniki. Today he will ask his father, Mr. Andrikos, to accompany him to the swearing-in ceremony for his promotion to the higher rank at the University - a father-son train journey, with time running backward.
Summary
Set in Greece in 2012, The Promotion follows Nikos, a film director and professor of film directing at the University of Thessaloniki. When he is appointed to a higher academic rank, he asks his father, Mr. Andrikos, to accompany him to the swearing-in ceremony. Their trip from Athens to Thessaloniki becomes the film’s emotional center: a seemingly ordinary train journey that opens into a layered exploration of their shared past, with time moving backward and memories gradually reshaping the present. As father and son travel together, the film focuses less on external events than on the silences, tensions, and unspoken affection between them. Nikos’s professional achievement provides the immediate occasion for the journey, but the deeper subject is his complicated bond with a father whose presence has shaped his life and sense of identity. Their conversations and recollections bring personal history into contact with questions about ambition, artistic vocation, family expectations, and the ways people carry old wounds into adulthood. Using its reverse movement through time as both a narrative device and a reflection on memory, The Promotion considers how relationships are understood differently when viewed from the present back toward their origins. It is an intimate, contemplative film about aging, regret, recognition, and the possibility of connection between generations, while its train setting gives the story a quiet sense of movement through both the Greek landscape and the characters’ emotional history.
