Synopsis:
87-year-old persecuted and declared guerrilla Giannis Lionakis, in a farewell trip to the place that defined his life, tells us about a 14-years (1948-1962) incredible survival effort, which begins with the end of the Civil War in Crete.Read More »
Athanasia, Theodoros, George and Chrysoula live and move around Zefyri, Menidi and the wider region. They no longer live in chattels and camps, but in a modern urban environment, each according to what they can afford. Their children and grandchildren are trying to educate themselves. Through small stories about their lives, each of them slowly unfolds his own special personality. They become people with dreams, hopes and disappointments, but also with an ancestry that has importance.Read More »
Quote:
Life is a baffling but also intriguing imitation of itself in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to well-received arthouse hit Dogtooth. Scarcely less bizarre than that droll excursus about a family that lives, loves and even speaks at one surreal remove from the rest of the world, Alps denies us such traditional cinematic handholds as rounded characters with backstories; a plot with an identifiable moral arc; neatly tied narrative ends; an easy-to-read ‘message’. Yet the film only very occasionally feels like a piece of self-indulgent arthouse mystification: most of the time, this story of a team of melancholy, oddball characters who help (or profit from) the bereaved by standing in for departed loved ones holds us emotionally and intellectually – and ends by saying something profound about a world in which ‘reality’ is just another TV format…Read More »