As Greece sinks deeper into a debt crisis that has brought sweeping layoffs, wage cuts and tax hikes, a group of young film-makers are among the few giving the country something to smile about.
At the forefront is Yorgos Lanthimos, a TV commercials veteran who made a stunning dash from near-obscurity in 2009 to an Academy Award foreign film nomination earlier this year for his film “Dogtooth.”
With his next project, “Alps,” a movie about a company that hires out impersonators to stand in for dead people, he added another feather to his cap, winning the best screenplay prize at the Venice film festival Saturday.
Fellow director Rachel Athina Tsangari, a co-producer of ‘Alps, last year turned heads with “Attenberg,” another offbeat drama about an eccentric young woman who has a belated sexual awakening in a small Greek town.
"We’re a generation who mostly studied abroad, live in Greece and are finely attuned to the country’s present climate," Tsangari told AFP.
"The Greek crisis unites us," she said.
The latest crop of Greek film-makers are busily exploring new ground in a clear break with the home industry’s standard fare.
Until the seventies, Greek cinema mainly produced feel-good family comedies from a stable of directors and actors milked for over two decades.
In the eighties, when the country’s best-known auteur Theo Angelopoulos began his rise to prominence, the mood became darker and more ideological, shifting the emphasis to Greeks coming to grips with urbanism and the scars of the country’s postwar civil strife and a subsequent army dictatorship.
But the new generation of Greek cinema has entirely different pursuits.
Along the way, the notion of family — a paramount institution in Greece — is often stretched to new limits.
Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth” is a surreal journey into the claustrophobic life of two sisters and a brother ensconced in a villa by their parents.
“Strella” by Panos Koutras, another offering of Greece’s so-called ‘weird wave’ released in 2009, is a drama about a transsexual seeking his son.
"The explosion of new Greek cinema started in 2009 with ‘Dogtooth’ but ‘Plato’s Academy’ in 2008 started the show," said Yiannis Zoumboulakis, a film critic at To Vima weekly, referring to a bittersweet 2009 comedy about a Greek shopkeeper who fears he might have Albanian roots.
"Between 1980 and 1990 filmmakers were trying to copy Angelopoulos, and generally it was a bad photocopy. His shadow was very big. And the films then had a little bit of local prospective; they wanted to stay here in Greece. Since 1991, things are changing," Zoumboulakis said.
Ironically, Greece’s newest cinema hero is already looking for ways to make films abroad.
"The common thing is we have no funds, so we have to make our own very cheap, very small films," Lanthimos told the Guardian in a rare interview last month.
"There are no real producers in Greece and no public money any more. Most of the time we don’t really know how to do it, it’s a nightmare.
"I thought the success of Dogtooth would make it easier but I don’t think that any more. I don’t know for how long people will sacrifice themselves for art," Lanthimos had said two weeks before Venice.
He later issued a three-line press release expressing "joy and some confusion" at jointly winning the screenplay award alongside co-writer Efthymis Filippou, and dropped another reference about "difficult conditions" that could have doomed the film.
