Greek Weird Wave
November: Greek Weird Wave, FLMTQ Releases 267-269
During the month of November Filmatique presents Greek Weird Wave, a series of films that refract the zeitgeist of contemporary Greece's economic, political, and spiritual turmoil. Often, these explorations adopt a style of mundane realism, stories of everyday life set within scenarios of macabre, bizarre, even violent milieux.
Three films by Weird Wave pioneer Yorgos Lanthimos launch the series. Lanthimos's first solo directing credit, Kinetta, plunges the spectator into a bleak seaside town off-season, where three eerily entwined locals are involved in shooting a movie. Flashes of humor and violence also populate Dogtooth, Lanthimos's masterfully bizarre portrait of a not-quite-normal family that catapulted him to international recognition. In Alps, Lanthimos's third film, an eccentric cast of characters offer their services as grief surrogates, posing as the recently deceased in a dangerous game of doubles.
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Kinetta, Yorgos Lanthimos (2005)
Kinetta, Yorgos Lanthimos / Greece, 2005
A seaside town. Sun-drenched and thronged with tourists in the summer, it is now winter, and the landscape is barren, dreary. Three locals live vaguely intersecting lives—a maid at a local hotel dawdles in the beige rooms, vaccuuming empty spaces and spying on the occasional guest, until she is recruited to star in a film, shot by a solitary photo store clerk. A third man, the director, places the maid in strange and humiliating situations which she is increasingly reluctant to oblige. Slowly, the dynamic between these three reticent characters begins to come into focus.
Embracing a handheld, roaming camera and nearly wordless physical dialogue, Kinetta is a cryptic portrait of isolation, violence, and boredom. Yorgos Lanthimos's first feature as a solo director premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto, CPH:PIX, and Thessaloniki.
Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos (2009)
Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos / Greece, 2009
A handsome, well-manicured estate in the Greek countryside. A wealthy businessman lives here with his wife and three grown children, all in their twenties. They are ostensibly an ordinary family, except that the children are governed by bizarre behavioral ordinances, and have never left the compound—a rite of passage reserved only for when their dogtooth comes in. When the father brings in a girl from the outside world to satisfy his son's sexual urges, the meticulously maintained rules of engagement within the family begin to shift course.
At once playful, sinister, and thoroughly bizarre, Dogtooth probes the boundary between fantasy and the stark strangeness of psychological realism—an astonishing portrait of one of cinema's strangest families. Yorgos Lanthimos's second feature premiered at SXSW, Karlovy Vary; Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where it won Best Film; and the Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Film in Un Certain Regard.
Alps, Yorgos Lanthimos (2011)