Melina Mercouri is probably one of the most remarkable women in Greek culture of the 20th Century. Mercouri started her career in 1955 with her film debut, Stella, and went on to become a political activist during the military junta and became the country's first female Culture Minister in 1981.

Sixteen years after her death in 1994, the Hellenic Foundation for Culture in Sofia is pay tribute to Mercouri with three of her feature-lenght films and a documentary on her life and work.

The tribute started on February 1 with the screening of the documentary A Portrait of Melina Mercouri by director Laszlo Hartmann, followed by Never on Sunday,  1960 black-and-white film in which Mercouri plays Ilya, a prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus.
For her role, Mercouri received the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award, and was nominated for the both the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress.

On February 2, He Who Must Die, a 1957 French film by director Jules Dassin, based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kantzakis, is to be screened.

In He Who Must Die, Mercouri plays the role of Katerina, who is given the role of Mary Magdalene in the village's annual Passion play. The play becomes reality as a group of villagers, uprooted by the war and impoverished, arrive. In the context of Greece in the 1920s under Turkish occupation, each of the characters plays out their biblical role in actuality.

Topkapi, a 1964 film based on the novel The Light of Day by Eric Ambler and directed by Mercouri's later husband Dassin will be screened on February 3. For her role in the film Mercouri was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.

All screenings are the Hellenic Foundation for Culture on 51 Benkovski street and entrance is free of charge.