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Greek cinema’s new wave – CUFF preview

Somewhere between the folklore Zorba the Greek and the economic and political breakdowns Greece has emerged with some outstanding new films. Independently financed esthetically strong and telling original stories films such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth and now Attenberg from writer director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari are at the forefront of a new wave in Greek cinema.

The story follows Marina (Ariane Labed) who idles isolated in a private company town. She acts as a sort of taxi service observing a promiscuous friend as she might watch a David Attenborough documentary. She lives with her father who designed the town — a modernist failure now decaying.

Her father grows increasingly ill and desires to be cremated a taboo in Greece. As Tsangari passionately explains burials in Greece have become a class issue with cemeteries becoming wildly expensive and cremation abroad even more so.

Her relationship with a visiting engineer (Yorgos Lanthimos director of Dogtooth ) is similarly direct which leads to some uncomfortable moments. Tsangari says she treated her characters as if they had taken truth serum and were unable to tiptoe around an issue. She cites westerns as an inspiration saying the film is a “showdown between all the characters and straightening out the honour of everyone.”

Negotiating death and sexuality could easily have become overly contemplative but Tsangari’s script is deliberate in what it wants to suss out and charming in its assertiveness — original yet universal as a rite-of-passage story.

The film is really all about transition and decision making aspects reflecting Greece’s recent breakdown. Tsangari wrote the script in December 2008 during the riots in Athens.

“When I was writing it the whole city was burning” she says. “So there was this sense of melancholia and failure and alienation and what’s next?” She describes the country as experiencing “the most amazing breakdown in ethics ideology economics — everything. To me Attenberg was very much the only film I could make about Greece right now.”

This is Tsangari’s first film as a director in her native country. She returns after 12 years during which time she pursued a master’s degree in performance studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a master’s degree in directing from the University of Texas in Austin.

Her thesis film The Slow Business of Going garnered an invitation to create large-scale video projections for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympics. Creating installations that combine elements of opera and theatre is what we might call her day job. She acted as an associate producer for her friend Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film Dogtooth and the two will work again on Lanthimos’s next film Alps . Tsangari hopes to complete an English-language western back in Austin and a science fiction script.

In her homeland Tsangari is optimistic about a new wave of independent filmmakers. In 2005 she founded HAOS Films an independent production company. Previously only state-funded films got made.

“Some of us went abroad we figured out new ways of doing independent cinema; it’s changing the ethics and practice in cinema-making in Greece” she says.

Despite the financial setbacks of making films during the country’s economic crisis Lanthimos and Tsangari prove it can be done. Attenberg has been touring the festival circuit picking up a best actress award for Ariane Labed at the Venice Film Festival and showing recently at New Directors/New Films in New York. Call Tsangari part of Greek cinema’s new wave.

“[ Attenberg ] is a new type of Greek film that is hopefully not folkloric and is not about blue skies and people dancing on roofs. It’s a different kind of Greece…. The national cinema of a country has this mirror relationship with the reality. So as Greece is changing the cinema has to change so it mirrors each other.”

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