Soft Beauty and a Generous Eye: The Gentle Appeal of Bearcave
Two young women climb to a high point over their hometown, share a joint, and look out over the place they come from, now reduced to a distant landscape. “It looks small,” says one. “It is small,” says the other. Bearcave (Arkoudotrypa, 2025) is about many subjects, but an essence of the film is captured here: how perspective changes things, how home is defined, how friendship means understanding the simplest things in a few words.
Bearcave was my favorite film of the Thessaloniki ’25 festival, a languid, luminous study of these friends, who part for a while before eventually finding each other, despite the resistant society around them. Our FIPRESCI jury gave it our prize for Greek cinema; our other award, the international competition, went to Karla.
Bearcave is expanded by co-directors Krysianna Papadakis and Stergios Dinopoulos from a 2023 short of the same title. It unfolds in unhurried chapters, aglow with countryside light, the mystery of personality, and the exhilaration of nonconformity. Our guides through this trek are Argiro (Chara Kyriazi), a farm girl, and Anneta (Pamela Oikonomazi), her flashier friend, a cosmetician. Anneta reveals that she is pregnant by her macho cop boyfriend, with whom she plans to move to a larger town; her adventures there take up much of the middle section of the movie.
Anneta’s odyssey away from home (it’s hard not to see the mythological underpinnings in so many Greek movies) will ultimately have her circling back to Argiro and their shared rural roots. But in the meantime, Bearcave has many lovely side-trips to explore, including the reliable comic rhythm of Anneta’s time with her prospective mother-in-law, who doesn’t seem to care much for Anneta and ruthlessly hogs the TV remote control—although at least they can bond over traditional clarinet music. These scenes, with the boyfriend off at work and Anneta trapped in a dull apartment, play out in a wonderful Jarmusch-like deadpan.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, Argiro nurses resentment (Anneta left without saying goodbye) and contemplates the possibility that the farm might be failing. Joining the different pieces of the film is an ever-so-slightly surreal sequence in which Anneta bakes a nettle pie, carefully packs it, and then walks—her intention, apparently, is to walk out of her town life and back to the rural world. And so she ambles, carrying this absurd pie, and leading us into a series of scenes that become giddy in the way they embrace liberation and uncertainty.
Looming over all of this is the excursion the two women take at the beginning of the movie, to a cave where a bear allegedly roams. The movie shows this cave as a frankly vaginal image—subtlety is not the point here, just pure female energy—a place that the viewer doesn’t actually see but that holds a mysterious force, especially for Argiro, who enters the cave, later claiming to have seen a bear there.
Bearcave is certainly admirable for the issues it addresses, its depiction of two women finding intimacy in a society that remains bound by tradition. That is all to the good. But it is the film’s lyrical qualities that distinguish it—the soft beauty of the images, the generous eye for the vagaries of human behavior. There are a few big scenes, including a glorious sequence when Anneta commandeers the microphone at a party and torches local manners and customs, one of those great going-down-in-flames monologues. But most of the film is modest and gentle, alive to how fallible its characters are; in the early minutes, Anneta appears to be a rather shallow girl, with her glib treatment of her own future and her focus on the superficial business of hair and nails. Or so we might think. As her trajectory progresses, we realize that she contains multitudes, in her own offhand style.
The movie sneaks up on you in a similar way. Whatever sort of films Papadakis and Dinopoulos might make in the future, Bearcave is a real beauty.
Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025