Document Type
Response or Comment
Publication Date
1-31-2026
Abstract
This document comprises two speeches delivered by Professor Katerina Zacharia on January 31, 2026, at Loyola Marymount University. The first speech marks the launch of the inaugural Los Angeles Greek Documentary Film Festival (LAGFF-doc) and celebrates a decade of educational partnership between LMU's Department of Classics & Archaeology and the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival (LAGFF). It reflects on the program's growth since 2014 — encompassing over 220 student interns, 135 students in Greek cinema courses, and 15 School of Film and Television faculty jurors — and articulates LMU's Jesuit mission of educating the whole person through experiential learning, critical inquiry, and social justice engagement. The second speech presents the inaugural LMU Prize for Social Justice for Best Feature Documentary to Mankind's Folly: Climate Crisis and Energy in the Arctic, written and directed by award-winning Greek documentary filmmaker Yorgos Avgeropoulos — a film that bears witness to the catastrophic thawing of Arctic permafrost and its devastating impact on Indigenous communities on both sides of the Bering Strait, while indicting the fossil fuel industry for expanding drilling operations on the very ground it is destroying. The prize recognizes Mankind's Folly as an urgent and unflinching work of documentary filmmaking — honest, rigorous, and at times genuinely frightening in its portrait of a global emergency unfolding at the edges of the inhabited world.
Digital Commons @ LMU & LLS Citation
Zacharia, Katerina, "Opening Remarks at the Launch of LAGFF-doc and the Inaugural LMU Prize for Social Justice for Documentaries: The LMU–LAGFF 10-Year Educational Partnership" (2026). Classics and Archaeology Faculty Works. 18.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/classics_fac/18
