‘Is it just coincidence that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema?’ wonders The Guardian journalist Steve Rose in his article ‘Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema’, asking whether ‘the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari [are] a product of Greece’s economic turmoil’ (2011). The correlation between the country’s severe financial crisis and a particular corpus of its cinematic production emerged as an
interesting hypothesis back in the early 2010s, generating numerous questions about the meanings and interpretations of the crisis, but most significantly with regard to its social, cultural and affective anifestations.
In a talk to be given at the Hellenic Cente in London next Thursday 16th September, 2021 at 7pm, Dr. Marios Psaras, Cultural Counsellor at the Cyprus High Commission in London, will revisit landmark films that constituted the original ‘weird corpus’,such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), Panos Koutras’s Strella (2009) and AthinaRachel Tsangaris’s Attenberg (2010), reflecting on reading the “weird” as “queer” and identifying the thematic and formal disenchantment with traditional heteropatriarchal values and the representation that guided the national imaginary and experience. We shall then turn to later works, such as Tonia Mishialis’ Pause (2018), to evaluate the after-effects of the original wave.
‘The Weird Wave of Greek Cinema: a Movement or a Moment?’
Thursday 16 September 2021, 7pm
Hellenic Centre, 16/18 Paddington Street, London W1U 5AS
Dr Marios Psaras holds a Degree in Education & Philosophy (University of Cyprus), an MA and a PhD in Film Studies (Queen Mary University of London). He is the author of the first book-length study on contemporary Greek cinema, The Queer Greek Weird Wave: Ethics, Politics and the Crisis of Meaning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). As a film scholar, Dr Psaras has taught film theory at Queen Mary, King’s College London, University of Greenwich, and has lectured across Europe. He has
published articles, reviews and book chapters on contemporary Greek, European and global queer cinema. Dr Psaras has previously worked in education, radio and TV production, and has directed for the theatre and cinema. His most recent short film, The Call (2020), has won Special Mention at the 43rd Drama International Short Film Festival and is currently screening at film festivals worldwide. Dr Psaras is a member of the Hellenic Film Academy, artistic director of the annual festival Cyprus Short
Film Day, London, and a member of the editorial board of Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. Since September 2018, he has been the Cultural Counsellor at the Cyprus High Commission in London.