From the 32 Greek premieres crammed into the Greek section of the 66th TIFF, it became clear that the selected films—quite uneven in terms of direction—were oriented towards specific themes, related to the exploration of queer identity, avoiding current political issues, such as impoverishment, rising prices, labor rights, gender inequality, and femicide. However, it is not clear whether this is due to targeted choices made by the festival, with the possible rejection of different subjects, or whether it is due to the directors themselves, who, in order to secure funding and recognition, succumb to the guiding themes of international festivals.
Beachcomber (Silver Alexander Directing Award), the second feature film by 40-year-old Aristotelis Marangos, was inspired by the letters of the popular Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias, who used his travels around the world as a sailor and his life at sea as powerful metaphors for the escape of ordinary people outside the boundaries of reality.
40-year-old Elias, a veteran mariner who dreams of sailing again someday, is on probation and survives by transforming abandoned ships. His eloquence at the local bar in the evenings, in bringing to life sailors’ stories and legends of distant seas, captivates a group of daily wage laborers, who become his own team. Together they attempt to shape an old ship, half-buried in the sand, into their own “lifeboat,” to take them away from a miserable everyday life—without, however, taking into account scrap-metal gangs.
The inner psychological dimension of the anti-hero protagonist is built through experimental cinema, with scattered shots of stormy seas suggesting existential anguish, while the strange dreams that haunt him are conveyed with different cinematic material, from old videotapes. Furthermore, Elias constantly listens to recorded tapes with the voice and the narration of his own absent sailor father. In addition to the brilliantly filmed winter light of the seascape of the Greek island of Lesvos, the mysterious atmosphere is also enhanced by successful poetic metaphors between abandoned ships and whales washed ashore, following the tradition of legendary whalers in both literature and cinema. Finally, the electrifying, intensely physical leading performance of Christos Passalis, as Elias, fluctuates between tenderness, wild depression, and madness, recalling River Phoenix’s appearance in My Own Private Idaho (1991/Gus Van Sant).
Bearcave, the first feature film by Chrysianna Papadaki and Stergios Dinopoulos, swept the awards, including the FIPRESCI Award, in a story about the unrequited love of two girls in the countryside.
In the mountain village of Tyrna in the Trikala region of northeastern Greece, 20-year-old Argyro (Hara Kyriazi) dedicates herself to manual labor on her father’s farm, willing to remain in the village, while her dear friend Anneta (Pamela Oikonomaki), pregnant by her police officer fiancé, reluctantly prepares to follow him to the city of Larissa. The two women’s visit to a famous mountain cave called “Bearcave” marks the moment when they leave behind their childhood fears, ready to take responsibility for their own decisions. While the silent and honest Argyro accepts her overwhelming feelings for her beloved friend, the sensual and impudent Anneta departs for Larissa. The suffocating context Anneta experiences there forces her to reconsider her decision and she soon returns to Tyrna, demanding her freedom, ready to clash with narrow-minded patriarchal perceptions.
Through two contrasting protagonists, the difficult path to independence is built in a film full of the mountainous landscape of the region, renewing the tradition-modernity dipole with contemporary situations. The basic cinematic conventions of a coming-of-age film are enriched by an inclusive queer relationship. The film also borrows elements from thrillers, acquiring a mystical pagan character with its shots full of nature, while mobile-phone photography adds a different format. Traditional musical choices are also extremely significant, with clarinet and polyphonic music from the Epirus region and Thracian bagpipes. In a film with comic moments and tenderness, the pie-cooking scene features the traditional song “My Chalasia” by Petroloukas Chalkias, expressing nostalgia for birthplace and loved ones, in the footsteps of Greek films of the 70s; also featured is contemporary Greek hip-hop music, by Negro Tou Moria and Marina Satti, who use traditional forms to signal a renewed Greekness.
Life in a Beat, the first feature film by Amerissa Basta, in the Competition of the Meet the Neighbors+ section, dares to capture contemporary social reality, after the devastating attack of the Greek bailout agreement over the last 15 years.
20-year-old Lena (Elina Tsiorbatzi) is looking for a small and cheap apartment, struggling to get away from the panic of her family home with her unemployed father (Antonis Tsotsiopoulos), her Albanian hairdresser stepmother, and her younger Greek-Albanian brother. The elusive dream of independence soon takes off when she is fired from her job, as cashier in a supermarket. In this unfortunate juncture, the discovery of her pregnancy from a casual relationship turns into a legal right to annul her dismissal. Unaware that her decision is equivalent to an act of war with the administration, she faces the difficult situation alone, with her only support her gay best friend, while time pressures her to make a final decision, knowing that she is unable to raise a child alone.
A former award-winning short film director, Basta creates a complete social cinema influenced by the realistic immediacy of the Dardenne brothers, full of suffocating frames and close-ups, with a camera constantly following the protagonist. The director insists on capturing the suffocating context of today’s youth, drowning in the despair of unemployment and job instability, unable to establish their own families. The film also highlights the taboo of abortion, emphasizing the right to choose, while referring to the recent housing crisis and the complete collapse of labor rights. Recalling Andrea Arnold’s portraits of teenagers, the protagonist’s youthful existence is framed by the graffiti-filled Athenian urban landscape and contemporary Greek-speaking artists such as LEX, Pan Pan, Taf Lathos, Nalyssa Green, and Echotopia.
Nikos Kornilios’ Winter Sea, a film with rare political references to modern Greek history, is about three protagonists and their relationships connecting place, time, and memory.
The lonely 27-year-old Nadine (Katsinde Adelaide), a German geologist who is conducting research at the mineralogical museum of Lavrio, an industrial area near Athens, meets the studious Christos (Vangelis Rokkos), a security guard at the industrial facilities of the local refineries, as well as the taciturn fisherwoman Katerina (Parthenopi Boutzouri). These two 65-year-old Greeks were once a loving couple who are now estranged, as they have not spoken to each other for 27 years. While Nadine bears the trauma of her Greek father’s emigration, Katerina has followed the lonely profession of her own elderly fisherman father, while Christos’ father and grandfather were miners in the local mines in Lavrio, where Nadine searches for minerals. The winter landscape with cloudy skies and stormy sea opens up before them, with the horizon, however, being overwhelmed by the island of Makronissos in front of them, a notorious place of exile, memory and martyrdom, the site of a political prison of the tormented decades of 1960s and 1970s.
Personal memories that unite the three lonely protagonists are connected in parallel with the historical past of Lavrio a century ago, with reference to labor struggles and miners’ strikes, while Christos’ stories about his relatives who were tortured fifty years ago in the hell of Makronissos prison, connect the small scale of modern history with the past of thousands of years ago, encompassed on rocks, and the bitter memories of Nadine’s father’s migration in the 1960s. While stories from the past haunt people and places, the frustrated Nadine believes that today does not exist because we do not have time for it, while wondering if we are free without memories. As an experienced director, Kornilios manages to create exceptional connections between memory, time, and history, while the passage of time in geological fossils is correlated with the time read on people’s faces and the memory of the place where the three protagonists meet. Filled with the vocal experimentations of the Greek singer Savina Giannatou, the film closes in the windswept landscapes of the abandoned camp of Makronissos.
Ifigeneia Kalantzi
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025