BLACK FIELD (MAVRO LIVADI)
Dir. Vardis Marinakis
In 1654, a wounded soldier seeking refuge in a remote cloister is nursed back to health by a young nun. The relationship between the two deepens, causing discontent in the convent. The two escape into the Greek countryside where the nun’s shocking revelation will become the catalyst for an encounter of raw sexuality. Stunningly photographed, this film won the Hellenic Film Academy’s award for best cinematography earlier this year.
(Adults only)
THE BUILDING MANAGER (O DIAHIRISTIS)
Dir. Periklis Hoursoglou
A family man assumes more responsibilities than he can handle when he takes over the management of his mother’s apartment building. But it is his affair with a woman half his age that precipitates his mid-life crisis and threatens the sanctity of his marriage and his family.
(Adults only)
DOGTOOTH (KYNODONTAS)
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
This controversial film that is finding audiences everywhere it plays focuses on a dysfunctional family, its three teenagers kept completely cut off from the world by their parents in an alternately nightmarish and surreal experiment of manipulation and suppression. Winner of the Un Certain regard prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, this film was named Best Picture of the Year by the Hellenic Film Academy. It is Greece’s entry for Best Foreign Film Academy Award consideration this year.
(Adults only)
FOUR BLACK SUITS
(TESSERA MAVRA KOUSTOUMIA)
Dir. Renos Haralambidis
Four desperate undertakers accept an odd assignment for the money. They are to carry the body of a deceased immigrant on foot, from Athens to the village of his birth. Everything goes wrong along the way in this sometimes surreal comedy, but the men get more out of the misadventure than they bargained for.
(Adults only)
THE ISLAND (NISOS)
Dir. Christos Dimas
The death of a prominent citizen reveals the corruption that festers behind closed doors on a seemingly serene Greek island. No one escapes being tainted—not the local politician, nor the teacher, nor the priest! This film broke box office records in its commercial release in Greece earlier this year
(Adults only)
PLATO’S ACADEMY (AKADIMIA PLATONOS)
Dir. Filippos Tsitos
In the quiet Plato’s Academy neighborhood of Athens, four ethnocentric Greek slackers spend their days watching industrious immigrants working all around them. When one of the four discovers his Albanian heritage, their smug outlook, not to mention their friendship, is severely challenged. This film won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival in 2009, and its male lead, Antonis Kafetzopoulos, was named best actor. The film was shown at the Venice Film Festival last month.
STRELLA: A WOMAN’S WAY (STRELLA)
Dir. Panos Koutras
Released from prison after serving a long sentence, a man begins an affair with a pre-op transsexual, never imagining how much they actually have in common. This film premiered at the Berlin Film festival in 2009 and has since been shown at more than twenty festivals around the world. It won four Hellenic Film Academy Awards earlier this year, including the best actress award for Mina Orfanou, who plays Strella.
(Adults only)
WITH HEART AND SOUL (PSYCHI VATHIA)
Dir. Pandelis Voulgaris
Two brothers, seventeen and fifteen year old shepherds from the mountains of western Macedonia, find themselves on opposite sides of the brutal Greek Civil War. Master filmmaker Pandelis Voulgaris has dedicated his epic film to the thousands of victims who lost their lives on both sides of the conflict that no one won but that Greece lost.
COLOSSI OF LOVE
Dir. Nikos Mystriotis
This funny and revealing documentary goes to Rhodes, the island of Aphrodite, to relive the days of the kamaki (Greek for harpoon) suitors, men who perfected the art of seducing foreign tourists visiting Greece in the 1970s and 80s.
AMERICA, AMERICA
Dir. Elia Kazan
One of the most stunningly poetic and powerful immigration sagas ever filmed, this epic tale is loosely based upon the life of Kazan’s uncle Stavros. Leaving his impoverished village in Turkish Anatolia for Constantinople, the young man eventually fulfills his obsessive dream of coming to America, but not before he faces cruelties and betrayals along the way.
DARK ODYSSEY
Dir. William Kyriakis and Radley Metzger
Shot mostly in Washington Heights in the 1950s, this early American independent film tells the gripping story of a Greek sailor, played by Athan Karras, who jumps ship in New York Harbor and goes looking for the man who assaulted his sister. When he falls in love with a compassionate Greek American girl, the sailor finds himself torn between love and machismo. This film is being shown as a tribute to actor and dance historian Athan Karras , who died earlier this year.