Multicultural Film Festival's Latest Screening Resonates With Him

A Greek film will be shown here Sunday because it resonates with musician and Sharon resident Yanni Pandelidis.

"Rembetiko" is "a tragic film covering a tragic era in Greek history," 1919 to 1956, and focuses on "the equivalent to the Greek society of what the blues is to American music," says Pandelidis, who came to the U.S. from Greece in 1972 to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"It is music that is created from people who are dispossessed. These are people who came over from Asia Minor as refugees" -- just like both sets of Pandelidis' grandparents.

The Sharon Pluralism Network will show the film from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Sunday in the Cynthia B. Fox Community Room.

It's the second of three films in the group's second .

Pandelidis will lead a discussion, and will perform with a band in the film's music style. He also will prepare spinach cheese pie and "my own version of lentil soup."

"It's a way for me to look back into my own roots," Pandelidis said of the film.

The film festival is among several initiatives of the Sharon Pluralism Network, a partnership founded in 2007 among seven Sharon groups: Interfaith Action, the , the Sharon Public Library, the Sharon public schools, the Sharon Recreation Department, Sharon Interfaith Religious Leaders Association, and the Sharon Community Youth Coalition.

Pandelidis said he had attended all four parts of Sharon's last multicultural film festival, held in 2009.

"I started seeing some of my personal recollections from Greece that were relevant," said Pandelidis, the founder and CEO of Zorion Inc., a start-up medical devices company in Sharon.

Although Sharon's Greek community is "very small," New England has about 250,000 residents "with some fraction of Greek blood in them," he said.

There's a New England federation of Greek associations, and downtown Boston hosts a Greek parade every spring, Pandelidis noted.

"Just about every weekend in the summer, there's a Greek festival somewhere in New England," he said.

"At least one, sometimes two."

Pandelidis said he hopes attendees on Sunday "achieve a little deeper understanding of the Greek culture" and see "some of the similarities with their own experience and their own culture."

"This is what I love about the Boston area. It is a flowering center for multiple ethnicities," Pandelidis said.