Greece

Synopsis:
Katina, an impoverished Greek woman, tries to arrange the marriage of her shepherd son, Thanos, to Despina, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. But when Despina’s father, Vlahopoulos refuses to give his blessings and wants Despina to marry a more wealthy gentleman, named Yankos. The wealthy and spoiled Yankos plots to break up the romantic union between Thanos and Despina any way possible while the young lovers plot to run away in a futile attempt to being a new life for themselves.Read More »

Quote:
A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late. Ariane Labed stars as Marina, a twentysomething naïf living in a small Greek city whose inexperience in all matters sexual is mirrored by her disgust for the act. In the film’s semi-notorious, heavily stylized opening sequence, Marina’s only friend, the sexually frivolous Bella (Evangelia Randou), teaches her how to kiss. As Tsangari frames the pair perpendicular to the camera against an abstract background, the two engage in a display of excessive tonguing so comically exaggerated that it only furthers Marina’s disgust. “You’re all slobbery. I’m going to throw up,” she says, before the young women give in to a round of improvised and manic play, spitting and blowing raspberries at each other, then squaring off in a mime of feral cats.Read More »

Synopsis:
During the dictatorship, a young man goes to Paris, where he seeks help from a solitary and almost misanthropic distant relative who works as a furrier. The young man carries with him the photograph of a singer whom he presents as his sister, thus causing a series of misunderstandings which trap him in a vicious circle of lies and fantasies. An allegory in the form of a modern-day tragedy of the “misunderstandings” and deceits of modern Greek History, as seen through the eyes of a Greek of the Diaspora.Read More »

Description: The story of a beautiful teenager girl whose life is turned around when her ex-porn star dad is made (by his producers) to cast her as the lead in his latest x-rated film. A devastating testimony of the rise and fall of Greek family values, an existentialist journey where habit and cruelty are only separated by life and death.Read More »

Quote:
One of the most outstanding directors of auteur cinema, Costas Zapas gained international acclaim with Uncut Family (2004) and The Last Porn Movie (2006). With Minor Freedoms his trilogy on the family is complete. Cineuropa: Minor Freedoms is the title of your latest film. However, in the film there is too little freedom. Your characters seem to have no choice.Read More »

The life of a boy in his adolescence takes a turn when his relationship with his mother and father is exposed.

Costas Zapas’ debut film.Read More »

Illia is Piraeus’s most popular person: an energetic prostitute, full of life and good humor.
Every day, she swims at the pier, entertaining the dock hands. Sundays she has an
open house with food, drink and song. Homer Thrace, an amateur philosopher from
Middletown, Conn., arrives in town to find out why Greece has fallen from ancient
greatness. He decides Illia is a symbol of that fall, so he sets out to study and to save
her. Unknown to Illia, he gets the money for the books and all else he gives her from Mr.
No Face, the local vice boss who wants Illia retired because her independence gives
other whores ideas. Whose spirit is stronger: Homer’s classical ideal or Illia’s?Read More »

The painful passage from being imprisoned in the extortionate dilemmas of familial and sexual relationships to accepting a personal point of view. A narrative constructed on the associative structure of memory and dreams.Read More »

Here is an excellent overview of the film that provides a ton of background information that greatly helps in understanding this outstanding film.

from Jump Cut, no. 10-11, 1976, pp. 5-6
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004

“In THIASSOS even though we refer to the past, we are talking about the present. The approach is not mythical but dialectical. This comes through in the structure of the film where often two historical times are dialectically juxtaposed in the same shot creating associations leading directly to historical conclusions… Those links do not level the events but bypass the notions of past/present and instead provide a linear developmental interpretation which exists only in the present.”
— Theodoros AngelopoulosRead More »