SmallPlanet is one of the most active and extroverted documentary production companies in Greece. Its films have been shown on television and/or in cinemas both in Greece and in dozens of other countries in Europe and the world and have been honored to date with 45 international awards at documentary and film festivals.

SmallPlanet was founded in 2002 in Athens by the producer Anastasia Skoubri and the acclaimed filmmaker and journalist Yorgos Avgeropoulos. Both with many years of experience in Greek TV networks, were inspired by the vision that the international cinematic language of documentary films can contribute to the public dialogue of our globalized societies.

Investing everything they had in this purpose, they began to create socio-political and anthropological films across the length and breadth of the earth, revealing a dark, unjust and often dangerous world, through stories of people full of resilience, hope and strength.

It was the first time that a Greek production company systematically attempted to implement something like this.

Until then, the majority of documentary production in Greece was inward-looking, with films mainly about antiquity and history, nature and tradition, which rarely crossed the country’s borders.

SmallPlanet challenged this approach by addressing the Greek audience as part of a much larger international audience of active citizens of the world, who care about social inequality and injustice, poverty, crime, human rights, the environment, minorities, immigration, the perception of gender, the Divine and Death, wherever on earth these occur.

Until 2013, most of SmallPlanet ‘s documentaries were released in Greece under the title Exandas Documentary Series written and directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos.

Exandas, trademark and flagship of the company, was shown regularly at first by Alpha TV and then for ten consecutive years by the Greek public television ERT.

In 2006, the 8th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival held a tribute to Exandas by screening ten of its films and publishing a special 40-page printed edition.

In 2007, Avgeropoulos’ documentary “Delta Oil’s Dirty Business” about the devastation caused by oil companies in the Niger River Delta in Nigeria, won the FIPA D’ARGENT at the Festival International des Programmes Audiovisuels (FIPA) in Biarritz, France. It was the first time that a Greek production of this kind was distinguished at an important European festival. The then prime minister of Greece, Kostas Karamanlis, and the mayor of Athens, Nikitas Kaklamanis, sent congratulation letters to Yorgos Avgeropoulos.

Since then, SmallPlanet’ s Exandas Documentary Series has been honored with another 34 international awards, while in Greece it was awarded seven times at the Television Awards as the Best Documentary on Greek Television.

The economic and social crisis that hit Greece in 2010 could not leave the audiovisual sector of the country unaffected. In 2013, the then Prime Minister Antonis Samaras shut down ERT with an authoritarian and unprecedented decision. Hundreds of employees were fired while Greek or foreign production companies, including SmallPlanet, suffered significant financial losses. In this environment, Yorgos Avgeropoulos and Anastasia Skoubri decided to suspend the production of Exandas and turn their cameras urgently to their homeland. After all, as Avgeropoulos said in his interviews with the press of that time, “the policies we were filming in Latin America, Africa and Asia are now in our backyard”.

Observing the Greek reality from inside on a social, political and economic level for ten years, SmallPlanet created two feature length films “AGORA – From Democracy to the Markets” (2014, Yorgos Avgeropoulos, Greece, Germany, Qatar, 120 minutes) and “Chained – AGORA II” (2020, Yorgos Avgeropoulos, Greece, Germany, France, 115 minutes). Both international co-productions with WDR, Al Jazeera and WDR/ARTE, were characterized by Greek, French and German media as “film – ark”, “audiovisual landmark of the Greek crisis” and “antidote to oblivion”. Haus des Documentarfilm awarded AGORA in 2015 the title of the film of the year while the Oscar-winning Director Costa Gavras stated in an interview that “recently I was impressed not by a fiction film but by the documentary AGORA”.

The two films were honored with a total of six awards including the Rockie Award (Banff World Media Festival, Canada), Gold Hugo (Chicago International Film Festival TV Awards) and Orpheus Award (Los Angeles Greek Film Festival). They were also an official selection of dozens of festivals such as CPH:DOX, DOK. Fest München, PriMed etc.

In the interim of completing the AGORA Project, SmallPlanet released “Up to the Last Drop” (2017, Yorgos Avgeropoulos, Greece, France, 60 minutes) in co-production with Arte, ERT, and KG Productions (France). Filmed in 13 cities in 6 countries of the European Union, the film examines water privatization and remunicipalization trends in Europe, as well as the EU policies regarding this precious good. The film was nominated for the Prix Europa 2018 and was broadcast by many international television networks around the world.

From 2013 onwards, every film by Smallplanet and Avgeropoulos is screened in cinemas in Greece and Europe. AGORA in particular was a success as it remained on the schedule of central cinemas in Athens and other major Greek cities for more than four months.

In addition to producing documentary films SmallPlanet also maintains a commercial division. It is active in the provision of technologically advanced audio-visual services as well as in the production of content on behalf of television networks or independent producers, as well as corporate presentations and communication videos for NGOs, International Organizations, etc. Its clients include UNHCR and IOM, the European Union-funded WES Project, as well as a number of TV shows, foundations and companies.

As SmallPlanet is not only a production office but also a one-stop audio-visual solution, with its own in-house equipment and with a robust and tested workflow, it has developed its own expertise and with its extensive network of experienced partners provides pre-production, production and post-production services to third parties.

In its facilities in Athens, 3 Km from the center of the city, it has its own cinematography systems and two fully equipped and modern 4K post-production suites in a network environment, with 5.1 sound, powered by ultra-fast servers whose total capacity exceeds 200TB.

As everything from design to completion is done in-house, this allows SmallPlanet to maintain the speed, control and security needed at every stage of production and implement specific workflows depending on each project, delivering a perfect result, on time and safely.