Hellenic And Back

For those who believe that artists need something to fight against – that, say, English post-punk needed Thatcher, or exiled Russian composers Stalin – the recent rise of Greek cinema is a prime exemplar. Hellenic films are alive with a socio-realist spirit; the country's dire economic straits and climate of protest reflected on screen. That's seen in All Cats Are Brilliant, the stand-out film from the 20th Greek Film Festival. Constantina Voulgaris sets scenes amongst real protests; but where a lesser filmmaker might, in the face of such drama, amp up their own, instead she retreats, seeking out blessed moments of daily life.

The Daughter is a calm, slow-building thriller laced with undeniable anger; its 14-year-old heroine (Savina Alimani) left to fend for herself by a father who's skipped town in the face of mounting debts and business foreclosure. In response, she kidnaps her eight-year-old cousin (Aggelos Papadimas) and locks them in the abandoned family lumberyard – her psychological manipulations of him an attempt at finding power in a country that's made her powerless.

There's another preternaturally driven girl at the centre of Marjoram, and when the psychologically crumbling 11-year-old sings “it's not your fault” to herself, it should be enough to break your heart. But the wild melodrama, stagy setting, and intermittently-awful acting (save Youlika Skafida) of Olga Malea's midday-movie is so overdetermined it borders on embarrassing – the weight of familial/social abuse nullified by the theatricality. The Tree And The Swing is just as hokey, Maria Douza's first feature sounding alarm bells from its endless opening-title-cards and their tedious statistics, which set the tone for a diaspora drama in which everything's spelled out.

Of course, any talk of the new-millennial reinvention of Greek cinema needs to talk about the Greek Weird Wave. At first, Giorgos Lanthimos (whose Dogtooth is one of the 21st century's great artworks) seemed like a lone weirdo who'd found filmic greatness in a country rarely known for it, but the GFF shows the movement he spawned thriving. There's a new work from Attenberg auteur (and Before Midnight actor!) Athina Rachel Tsangari: the fantastically-odd, mid-length gallery-piece The Capsule – a piece of unabashed high-art reminiscent of Matthew Barney. Then there's The Eternal Return Of Antonis Paraskevas, which boasts a starring turn from Dogtooth dad Christos Stergioglou, and stages a similar isolated-compound parable. Stergioglou plays the titular debt-riddled TV star who hides out, via a staged kidnapping, in an abandoned luxury retreat. It's a film about a man endlessly killing time, eventually descending into a fantastic madness, watching himself on TV until reality is obliterated. There's not a socio-realist moment therein, but with its droll downward spiral standing suitably symbolic, Elina Psykou's debut stages a mocking commentary on the troubled contemporary state of a once-great nation.