Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. Today we’re talking to respected Greek executive Panos Kouanis, who played a key role in establishing Greece’s 40% cash rebate scheme while at the National Center of Audiovisual Media and Communication (Ekome). Kouanis has since stepped down from that post and is currently building a hefty production slate via his GravityBreath Pictures banner and is gearing up to launch a fund for the film and television sectors.
Few people have had such a direct impact on Greece’s audiovisual industry in the last decade than Panos Kouanis. The respected executive is perhaps best known for setting up the country’s National Center of Audiovisual Media and Communication (Ekome) in 2017, where he was responsible for driving Greece’s highly competitive 40% cash rebate scheme.
The rebate was a welcome move for the country’s film and television sectors, which had been hit hard economically in previous years. Thanks to Ekome’s work with the Greek government coupled the country’s swift response to pandemic protocols, a raft of international productions such as Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and The Expendables 4 all set up camp in Greece shortly after Ekome was founded.
It’s been two years since Kouanis stepped down from his role as CEO and President at at that public institution, a move he says felt like a natural step after six years at the company. Since then, he has been ramping up his efforts in the production space via his banner GravityBreath Pictures, which he runs with his partner Angelos Kotaridis. He is also in the throes of building a €50M ($58.7M) production fund, dubbed Ostracon, which he expects to launch in Cannes 2026.
“We’re a 360-entertainment company,” says Kouanis of GravityBreath Pictures. “We produce film and television but also live entertainment because Angelos works in the music industry.”
The outfit is coming off the back of partnering with Westwind Pictures for Cast Aside the Clouds, from indie director Mary Darling. The film sees Anthony Azizi star as a Tehran bookstore owner whose daughter Utab (Parmiss Sehat) attends a secret university aligned with the Iranian Bahá’í faith. The project screened at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in October and Kouanis says the film is set to get a theatrical release in the U.S. and Canada, although details still remain under wraps.
The company is also working on Indian comedy-horror Destination Nadhuve, from director Pannega Bharana, which it plans to shoot in February, and in April it will begin shooting 10-part TV series Eleftherios Venizelos: The Man and the Leader for Greek broadcaster ERT and streaming service Ertflix.
The latter centers on the former Prime Minister of Greece who was a prominent leader of the Greek national liberation movement. Set to shoot in Athens and Crete, the series delves into Venizelos’ passions and personal moments rather than solely on his political achievement.
“The 1930s was an extremely adventurous time for Greek politics,” says Kouanis. “There were a lot of changes with kings coming and going. Venizelos was born and raised in Chania from a very political family and his father was very powerful at that time. He was a merchant and studied law in Athens from a very young age. He was a very important Greek figure, and we are sure this is going to resonate with local audiences.”
GravityBreath also has a number of feature films and series in development including Billy Beau, a film based on the memoirs of Makis Tselios about his relationship with Greek fashion designer Vasilis Kourkoumelis, aka Billy Bo. The story centers on the creativity, friendship and love between two men who, just as they were preparing to conquer the U.S., saw their journey abruptly cut short by the death of Billy Bo after he contracted AIDS and passed away at the age of 33. The Greek-language film, which is financed by ERT and EKKOMED, is expected to begin shooting in September 2026.
“It’s a very sad but beautiful story because it’s full of drama and love and the fashion of the 1970s and 1980s,” says Kouanis. “It’s a period where Greece was booming and blooming after the dictatorship of the early 1970s.”
The company is also gearing up for three TV shows, the first of which is Road Narrows, a six-part series that follows the relationship between an ailing widow in Constantinople and her daughter who lives in the U.S. The two, who have spent most of their lives thousands of miles apart, come together in Kotronas, Greece, perhaps for one last time. The series is an English and Greek-language project written and directed by Fay Lellios and Ersi Danou. Emma Thompson, George Pelekanos and Greg Gaitanes exec produce while Marcus Ovnell co-produces.
GravityBreath is also in development on a 10-part series dubbed The Acid Test, based on the novel by Joanna Harcourt-smith Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story, as well as Niki, a series based on the novel by Christos Chomenidis’s novel about a resilient Greek woman who recounts her and her family’s extraordinary story at the end of her life. Kounais says he is in discussions with international partners for the former and a local broadcaster for the latter.
Ostracon
While his production company is booming, Kouanis is perhaps most excited about his newest endeavor Ostracon, a Greek investment fund with a primary focus on film and television and a secondary focus on music, theatre, art, sports and wellness.
“It’s something that I have been working on and planning for the last couple of years and it’s a big focus for me,” he says, adding that the fund is 50% financed from a local bank and 50% financed from private investors in Greece, the U.S. and the Middle East.
The €50M ($58.7M) fund, he says, has a possibility to increase to €100M ($117.5M) with a second closing. “We’re investing in projects that are being materialized in Greece,” says Kouanis. “It can be infrastructure, for example, such as a studio or post-production companies or even a VFX company. It can also be music-related. We’re trying to be as open minded as possible.”
The fund has already started receiving proposals for projects to finance and Kouanis says they are looking at a “variety” of options. The plan is to officially launch ahead of the Cannes Film Festival next year.
“The important thing is that the company will have to invest in companies that are based in Athens and in Greece – we have to invest by law,” he says. “It can be any kind of idea that has a global output, but it has to be from a company that is based in Greece. It can be a movie in English with big stars as long as the production company or the SPV [special purpose vehicle] is set up in Greece and we can invest in that.”
He continues: “I really love stories and what they bring to the world and being able to help other people materialize their dreams is important to me. It’s through the fund and GravityBreath that I can do this. I enjoy supporting good stories and great scripts.”
First steps to Ekome
Kouanis has always loved movies and economics and throughout his career he has tried to merge the two. He studied economics at the University of Athens before moving to the U.S. where he did a Masters in film at Boston University. After stints in L.A. and London, he returned to Athens where he got a PhD in economics before working at various television stations in both the private and public sectors, including Hellenic Parliament TV where he was a Director.
Netflix
Working closely with the Greek government, in 2017 he proposed the idea of a cash rebate in a bid to save the country’s ailing film and television sectors.
“They gave me the greenlight to write the law and set up the company [Ekome] in 2017,” he says. “We opened the system and the first application was in April 2018. We started monitoring the whole process and, at the same time, we tried to make changes here and there so we could make it better. We then raised the rebate gradually from 25% to 40%, which is where it stands now and we also changed the cap to €12M. Now the cap is down to €8M.”
During his six-year tenure at Ekome, a huge swathe of Hollywood and international productions chose to set up camp in Greece including Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which filmed on the Greek upscale island of Spetses for Netflix, Millennium Media’s noir thriller The Enforcer with Antonio Banderas and Kate Bosworth as well as Apple TV+ series Tehran, which shot its second season in the territory. More recently, productions such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Amazon Prime Video’s big-budget series House of David both shot in the territory.
In the wake of Covid-19, Greece emerged as one of the most attractive destinations for productions, thanks to Greece’s prompt response to pandemic protocols after a hard lockdown coupled with an increase in financial and tax incentives.
But in 2024, the Greek government halted the incentive scheme for a few months, due to backlog of unpaid claims and applications awaiting approval. A new government body, dubbed Creative Greece (EKKOMED), which merged the Greek Film Center and Ekome, was formed to streamline the operations of the country’s screen industries. The ongoing delays in rebate repayment began to threaten the country’s reputation as a top destination for international film productions.
Kouanis, however, says that Ekome became “a little bit a victim of its own success” and stresses he’s not worried about the overall health of the rebate system.
“What happened is that it got so many applications and it was unable to handle these for two reasons: One is that it didn’t have enough capital for the rebate because they weren’t expecting so many applications, and the other is that they didn’t have enough personnel to process them. So, what happened is that it created a bottleneck. But this bottleneck is temporary right now and the government and management of the committee is working to solve it.”
He continued: “I’m not worried because I know that Ekome has the backup of the Greek government and they are doing all the right things to stabilize the whole system and by the end of the year, it’s going to be working smoothly. The truth is, our credibility was hurt, and the only way to fix that is by showing that we deliver what we promise and each one of us – the government and the producers – is doing our job.”
