Marisha Triantafyllidou
Orestes travels to a small island during the pandemic in order to set up, from scratch, a music festival. Confronted with the small society of the island and all its pathologies, he will find himself involved in an extreme love story that will be a motivation to manifest all the social problems that plague an entire group of people. They are all connected to each other and in a way complicit in what comes next...
Aris and Anna meet one evening in a half-abandoned town surrounded by antennas. In this strange, dreamlike world, the two solitary souls gradually start to develop feelings for one another.
Michalis has barely 24 hours to redefine his life and make up for his close ones. That same night he meets a girl. He only wishes that the morning never comes.
In 414 B.C., Aristophanes wrote the comedy Ornithes, in which two men leave their birthplace in search of a better life. They arrive in the woodland of the birds and meet Hoopoe, the man who became a bird. This Greek comedy is a contemplation, a voyage of discovery, an essay and perhaps even an indictment. The film mixes talking heads with theatre, street scenes and splendid panoramas. Based on the desire for freedom, but also the obstacles humanity imposes upon itself to find this freedom – walls around countries, social conventions, rules. Children play on swings to feel that tingling in their tummies, the evolutionary memory of flying through the air.
Kostis is a 40-year-old doctor that finds himself in the small island of Antiparos, in order to take over the local clinic. His whole life and routine will turn upside down when he meets an international group of young and beautiful tourists and he falls in love with Anna, a 19-year-old goddess.
A man who doesn’t know who he is meets his former love. She tells him he is a famous poet, Kostas Karyotakis, who killed himself in 1928. Every year he returns on the anniversary of his death.
For many years, Nadja has worked as a housekeeper for an upper class Greek couple and their daughter. She’s allowed to feel like part of the family. When she’s diagnosed with a serious illness, and the man of the house runs into financial difficulties due to the economic crisis, Nadja loses her job. Yet she shows no external sign of how these two traumatic events have affected her.
Strangers in their own birthplace, a camp 16-year-old, lollipop-sucking Dany and his 18-year-old brother Odysseus cross the entire country (along with pet rabbit Dido ) in search of their Greek father, who they only know as “The Nameless”, after the death of their Albanian mother. They hope to get Greek passports and citizenship but on the journey they encounter racism and prejudice.
According to the director: “The film deals with the corrosive effect, on a relatively advanced life, of what psychologists may call ‘the repressed’, while I prefer to concentrate on the beautiful Greek word ‘kaemos’ [καημός, translated as longing, unfulfilled desire]. The most ‘realistic’ and most synoptic… synopsis I can give for the fiction of the film is: ‘A man comes face to face with himself’, but this wording (and here comes the fantasy element) must be read literally.”
In Greece the advertisement in exterior billboards has been recently forbidden. As a result there are hundreds of blank billboards that don’t show any messages. But the empty frames are now the message. And Greece is out of frame.
Elias (Riccardo Scamarcio) is an immigrant in his twenties who tries to get to Europe by a boat along with other illegal immigrants. When the boat is near the Greek shores and they hope they will soon disembark, a marine patrol approaches and Elias jumps into the sea in order to avoid arrest. So do the other people in the boat. He wakes up next morning in a shore with nudists, which is not so bad after all, since he has lost some of his clothes while he was swimming for quite a few hours. He pretends to be a nudist himself, steals some clothes and he pretends he is an employee of the hotel “Eden Club-Paradise”.
A contemporary married couple and their eight-year-old son are exposed to our observation. The husband, around 35, works as a tax specialist for an import-export firm. His 30-year-old wife looks after their child and their home. The man's impending promotion at work triggers their dreams of social advancement and financial improvement. As their plain everyday life unfolds the characters are denuded to reveal their different needs and desires which render their functioning and communication increasingly hard. The man's inability to meet the escalating demands of his social circle and those of his wife brings tension into their relationship and leads to the culmination of the drama. The unexpected as well as extreme solution given by the heroine leads both the hero and the viewer to redefine reality on the basis of how things look and how they really are.
Constantina Voulgaris’s first feature film is a delightful anomaly in contemporary cinema, sort of like a Cat Power song. Raw, earnest, melancholy, awkward in parts, razor sharp in others, it's lyrical, yet with an undercutting touch of offbeat humor. And more than anything it's unapologetically a girl's bedroom song, an utterly sincere home movie. Made with the ever-generous currency of a cast and crew of friends, and the ample downtime that Greek summer-in-the-city affords, when everybody else is sunning and hooking up out in the islands, it's a film about two exiles -- in Athens, in summer, in love. A sentimental dance between a girl and a boy who could be stuck in downtown any-ville, yearning to be with each other but too cool to dare, too chicken to admit it, too clumsy not to step on each other's Doc Martens, and too damn sentimental not to surrender, in the end, to that old-fashioned thing called love.
Two brothers, the honest Michalis and the swindler Nontas, are forced to resort to bank robberies in order to pay off the latter's entanglements with the mafia. Michalis' love for a secret police officer, a strange couple of her colleagues and Nontas' greed will make things even more complicated.
A dodo, a bird that disappeared 3000 years ago, makes its appearance in Athens in the luxurious residence of a family on the verge of ruin for which the countdown has begun: the 38 crucial and saving hours that separate them from the marriage of their daughter with a rich heir. The boundaries between reason and madness will be tested and the situation will soon be out of control.
