The Hunters, a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.
Tag: GREECE
An English singer travels around the Greek countryside. He meets a strange creature, part man part fox, and together they start looking for Danilo Treles, a legendary musician from Andalusia. Tornes’ craziest film wears its heart on its sleeve, starting with the title, which could conceivably allude to a Spanish surname but even the director himself could not deny the direct reference to the Greek language (Treles translates into madness).
From the Medieval period through the Renaissance, Antoinetta Angelidi’s experimental work of allegories and aesthetic compositions contemplates the treatment and representation of women in Western art, moving through several historical stages and intertwining them with abstract sequences of perceptions, memoirs and varied perspectives, all of this executed with a very theatrical presentation.
A concentration camp on a barren island is hell for the exiled prisoners. The everyday life of the people who live there consists of interrogations, psychological and physical violence, arbitrary punishments and other torments. One of the prisoners who refuses to yield is subjected to torture. Trying to escape, he falls into the sea. When the Queen visits the island, the prison guards find the runaway and murder him without a second thought, since he is already assumed dead.
Artist returns to Santorini, where she spent her childhood, to face the ghosts of her past and her present.
While unearthing an icon of the Holy Madonna in her small apartment, an elderly Greek woman sighs that she is in the inevitable winter of her life. She studies a textbook of the French language, which she used to have a thorough command of, but unfortunately let slide. She hardly reads anymore, either, which she thinks rather stupid of herself. Her window on the world is her television, which she briskly comments on. The bleach-blond anchor woman is very sharp, but her favourite is newsreader Niko. The Box is a reflection in miniature format about old age and one-way communication in our media-dominated society.
The residents of a poor neighbourhood in Piraeus are asked to leave as modernization will take place. The prostitutes of one of the many brothels are preparing to move on. The camera follows their individual stories, their misery, shattered dreams and hopes for a better future.
C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was a Greek poet who wrote exquisitely about his beloved cities, Alexandria and Constantinople, and about the beautiful, sexually available men who lived in them. Thanks to Lawrence Durrell’s frequent favorable mention of him in his popular novels The Alexandria Quartet, Cavafy has become a figure of considerable literary interest outside of Greek and homosexual circles. Part biography, part fantasy, but very much in the spirit of the poet’s work, this film begins in 1933 as a young literateur reads to Cavafy, lying abed in an Alexandrian hospital. Cavafy drifts away into memories from his life and the film takes up his story from childhood.