News

It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]

The post “A Nihilist Western”: Athena Rachel Tsangari on Harvest first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]

The post “A Nihilist Western”: Athena Rachel Tsangari on Harvest first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

An eventful week in the waning days of a medieval English village provides the narrative backbone for Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s moody-verging-on-mopish adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. The book is written in a bewitching prose style somewhere between a monologue and a first-person essay. Dialogue is sparse, much of it denoted as overheard half-phrases, and the overall ambience alien, which is more than apt for a setting—a lord-of-the-manor-ruled agricultural collective—effectively lost to time.

Tsangari, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, finds her own way into this foreign land by accentuating the grit and the grime. This is evident in everything from Sean Price Williams’s grainy 16mm cinematography (some sort of crud is always visible at the edges of the frame) to the lead casting of Caleb Landry Jones, a performer who often seems like he’s just emerged dazed and confused from primordial sludge.

While lesser known than her contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari has played a large part in shaping the so-called “weird wave” that swept the country’s cinematic exports. Her international breakthroughs “Attenberg” and “Chevalier” highlighted the absurdity of social structures by having intrepid individuals flout taboos. Tsangari’s latest work, “Harvest,” approaches her central concern from the reverse angle, showing how the imposition of an artificial order fertilizes the soil to reap chaos.

Continue reading ‘Harvest’ Review: Caleb Landry Jones Tries To Expand Borders In Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Allegorical Drama [Venice] at The Playlist.

With her small but delicious body of directorial work, Greek New Waver Athina Rachel Tsangari has amassed a loyal fanbase. Her debut “Attenberg” (2010) announced a talent capable of balancing absurdist humor with an infectious warmth for human weirdness. Where lauded contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos makes his characters suffer to drive existential points home, Tsangari uses deadpan observations as a way to affectionately deepen her psychological portraits. Crucially, her creations care about each other, even if they are often hamstrung by certain weaknesses.

The announcement of a third feature, “Harvest,” world premiering at Venice, nine years on from “Chevalier,” was cause for genuine excitement among Tsangari heads. Forays into a TV miniseries (“Trigonometry” in 2020) and regular producing gigs have been no substitute for a feature film brewed in her singular mind palace. So, how does “Harvest” stack up?

At first glance, it seems like Tsangari has totally switched things up. Her first...

Greek writer-director-producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s last feature was 2015’s Chevalier, a sly black comedy skewering masculine hyper-competitiveness which built on the promise of her first two acclaimed works, Attenberg (2010) and The Slow Business of Going (2000). Those put her on the cutting edge of the Greek Weird Wave along with her compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), whose early work she often produced. Now Tsangari returns to Venice, where Attenberg made such a splash, with Harvest, a work of marked maturity and sobriety — less weird than woebegone and woad-tinted, based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Jim Crace. The result is a moving if willfully ahistorical study of an agrarian paradise lost.

Like Crace’s book, Harvest the film never specifies when and where the story takes place. However, the Scottish accents of the ensemble, which range from Glaswegian to the more northerly, teuchter cadences of the Highlands proper,...

Venice Film Festival competition title “Harvest,” directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, is one of three films at the festival to be represented for sales by the Match Factory as well as being produced or co-produced by the company.

The other two are “Edge of Night,” the debut feature by German-Turkish director Türker Süer, screening in Horizons Extra, and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” an animated film by the Quay Brothers, playing in Venice Days.

Tsangari, the director of “Attenberg” (winner of Venice’s best actress award in 2010) and “Chevalier” (2015), returns to Venice competition with “Harvest.” Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.

In Tsangari’s tragicomic take on a Western, townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk and befuddled lord of the manor Charles Kent are childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.

The film...

Vampires are eternal, and so are movies about them. The genre shows no signs of going bloodless anytime soon, even if the oldest texts continue to inspire some of its most compelling entries. Consider writer-director Adrien Beau’s “The Vourdalak,” an adaptation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s 1839 “The Family of the Vourdalak,” a foundational novella that predates Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” by more than half a century. After premiering in Venice last year, the film arrives in theaters less than a week after the trailer for “The Witch” helmer Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” remake dropped — a coincidence, surely, but one that’s nevertheless emblematic of the ur-texts’ enduring influence.

“The Vourdalak” doesn’t exactly announce its blood-sucking bonafides, though the signs are all there. A stranger introducing himself as an emissary of the King of France (Kacey Mottet Klein) loses his way while traveling through a remote village and is refused...

Inspired in part by 1970s experimental filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis and jumpstarted in earnest in 2009 by Yorgos Lanthimos with “Dogtooth,” and perhaps to a lesser extent Panos H. Koutras’ “A Woman’s Way,” the so-called Greek Weird Wave movement quickly spread like wildfire in the country. “Attenberg” soon followed in 2010, and the proliferating genre soon gave everyone in the country permission— maybe even actively encouraged all filmmakers—to fly their freak flag.

Continue reading ‘She Loved Blossoms More’ Review: Grief Takes Audaciously Bizarro Shape In Greek Weird Wave Horror Oddity [Tribeca] at The Playlist.

There is a subgenre that basks in the creaturely natures of girls and women. Forget the ethereal sisters of “The Virgin Suicides” for here are some hot messes. Found in the literature of Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter and Deborah Levy and in films by Josephine Decker and Luna Carmoon, this is a mode of characterisation that delights in stripping away the illusion of a “fairer sex” in order to marinate in the feminine grotesque.

Ariane Labed’s entry to this canon, her directorial feature debut “September Says,” is infused with her own history as a Greek New Wave actress. There are shades of her break-out role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ claustrophobic family drama “Dogtooth” and a callback to her animal impressions in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sublime, underrated “Attenberg.” Otherwise, Labed follows the sketchy map laid out by Daisy Johnson’s source novel, “Sisters.”

September (Pascale Kann) is older than her...

In August 2011, The Guardian ran a two-page spread that wound up christening a brand-new cinematic movement. Written by Steve Rose, “Attenberg, Dogtooth, and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema” began with two questions: “Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece’s economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?” Greece, as it turned out, continued to be troubled, the Greeks continued to make films, and the Greek Weird Wave somehow stuck as a catch-all term to denote what Rose then hyperbolically called “the world’s most messed-up cinema.” But the several films that earned the label since have only questioned its meaning and applicability. Messed-up and inexplicably strange the descendants of Attenberg and Dogtooth no doubt remain, but the many different shades of weird they brim can hardly be accounted for by an increasingly empty buzzword.

Michel Dimopoulos, former director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, has died. He was 74.

Dimopoulos served as Thessaloniki’s artistic director from 1991 to 2005. In a statement published Thursday afternoon, the festival said Dimopoulos brought a “fresh breath of originality” to Thessaloniki during his tenure and “expanded the institution’s international horizons.”

“Michel had always been on the side of the Festival and its people. He was an ardent film lover and a passionate supporter of independent European cinema,” the statement read.

“He will live on in Olympion’s corridors, in the Port, inside the movie theaters, tireless and with a smile on his face, soulfully speaking for the films he loved, expanding our horizons and introducing us to the pioneering and restless cinema of the new era.”

Dimopoulos was born in 1949 in Paris. He studied cinema in France and began his career as a film critic in Avgi, a daily left-wing newspaper published in Athens,...

By the time Tom Cruise arrived at the Cannes Film Festival for “Top Gun: Maverick,” a movie originally supposed to play at the festival two years ago, he had the seventh “Mission: Impossible” in the bag. Opening night entry “Final Cut” may be the first film from “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius since the pandemic hit, but it won’t be the last, as he’s already in post-production on the animated Holocaust drama “The Most Precious of Cargoes.” Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov finally arrived in Cannes following years of house arrest in the country to premiere “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” but he’s already halfway through a new production about a Russian exile starring Ben Whishaw.

Seemingly everywhere at this year’s festival are reminders of a global film industry clawing its way back after two horrible pandemic years. Projects started ramping up in recent months, with Cannes arriving right as...

Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou marks his directorial debut with “Apples,” an accidentally timely pandemic movie that captured imaginations at the Venice Film Festival, where it opened the respected Orrizonti section, and has since gone on to represent Greece in the international feature film Oscar race.

The film wasn’t actually shot during the Covid-19 crisis, but follows a man (Aris Servetalis) struggling to recover his memory amid a pandemic that causes widespread amnesia. Doctors at a special rehabilitation clinic present a list of tasks ranging from the mundane to the downright bizarre that may trigger his memory — all of which must be carefully documented with a Polaroid camera.

The film’s Lido bow in September — which, by most accounts, increasingly feels like a small miracle given the ongoing Covid-19 situation in Europe — marks the only time Nikou was able to watch “Apples” with audiences.

“I haven’t gone to any...

The Greek filmmaker’s new feature is based on Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. Greece’s Athina Rachel Tsangari is ready to direct her new project, a drama entitled Harvest. The Athens-born filmmaker is best known for her sophomore feature, Attenberg (2010), and for her buddy comedy Chevalier (2015), as well as for her recent television endeavour, the BBC Two series Trigonometry, which premiered during this year’s Berlinale Series and is set in a crowded, expensive London, where a cash-strapped couple is forced to open their small flat to a third person. The announcement was first reported by Screen International. The script of Harvest, based on Jim Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name and penned by veteran producer Joslyn Barnes, is set in a medieval village in England and follows the villagers’ reaction to three newcomers, who become scapegoats in a time of economic turmoil. The project benefited from.

If you think the folks in Days if Heaven had it rough…think again. Athina Rachel Tsangari is setting her sights on the book to film adaptation of Harvest – a 2013 novel by Jim Crace which features intimation, revenge, displacement and social decomposition. While her second and third features in coming-of-age a tad bit late anthropological bliss Attenberg (2010) and the one upping competition comedy Chevalier (2015) were contemporary setting affairs, this drama promises to bring out the best in harsh economic horse and trolley era with a healthy helping of The Crucible type denouement. The project will be produced by Sixteen Films’ co-founder Rebecca O’Brien (they obviously produce all of Ken Loach’s films and most recently Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here) who is teaming with the docu and distinctly auteur cinema producer Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films (this year they released Gunda in Berlin (read review) and In...

Exclusive: CAA has signed Greek director Christos Nikou, whose debut feature Apples is on sales this week in the Cannes virtual market.

French sales outfit Alpha Violet is handling international sales on the Euro co-pro, which is produced by Hercules Mavroeidis, who produced acclaimed Greek movie Attenberg and was an executive producer on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth. CAA is repping domestic.

The off-beat dramedy, currently in post-production, follows a solitary man who confronts his severe amnesia by undergoing an experimental treatment. When “Aris” meets “Anna,” who is undergoing the same memory loss treatment, their budding relationship challenges the ideas of whether we remember what we have experienced or what we have chosen to remember.

Nikou, who has also signed with manager Jerome Duboz, previously served as an assistant director for filmmakers including Yorgos Lanthimos and Richard Linklater. He is currently developing his next project, which will mark his English-language debut.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Ariane Labed's Olla, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from June 1 - July 1, 2020 in Mubi's Brief Encounters series.The number of actors who express interest in directing is probably highly disproportionate to the number of them that actually do. The actress Ariane Labed however has stepped behind the camera, all while her on-screen career motors on. You might describe Labed the actress as an old soul. Her face has embalmed a sort of sage-like wariness, ever since she debuted in Athina Tsangari’s Attenberg as a stunted young woman metaphorically cracking out of her shell with a literal idiosyncratic skip-step. Though she’s played in numerous parts since then, she’s perhaps most recognized for her roles in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos. When any creative individual is up to new work,...

Though you could enter this story from any number of angles, “Trigonometry” starts with Ray (Ariane Labed), a world-class synchronized swimmer who decides to change her life after a jarring accident. Moving out of her parents’ home and journeying to London, she finds a room in a flat, leasing from partners Gemma (Thalissa Teixeira) and Kieran (Gary Carr).

With Ray taking other jobs in the city, Kieran working as a paramedic, and Gemma trying to keep her humble cafe afloat, these three each have their own swirling lives distinct from each other. But as Gemma and Kieran start to consider the possibility of spending their lives together, they both find themselves drawn to the woman living in the next room.

So “Trigonometry” evolves in stages as these three start to navigate their feelings toward each other. Each chapter in this eight episode season (which originally aired on BBC Two earlier...

The French actor is best known for her work in arthouse films such as Attenberg and The Lobster. So what attracted her to a British TV drama about a three-way relationship?

Sunday nights on the BBC are usually the time for easy viewing, the televisual equivalent of the Carpenters. Think the low-stakes competition of reality shows such as Dragons’ Den and Win the Wilderness, or provincial dramas such as Last Tango in Halifax. This weekend, though, there is an altogether different type of entertainment on offer. Trigonometry is the sex-laden tale of a thrupple which develops when Ray, a Frenchwoman who is a newcomer to London, moves into the cramped flat of cash-strapped couple Gemma and Kieran.

The series begins with a Black Swan-style synchronised swimming contest gone wrong, an interrupted bout of masturbation and an argument. And that’s all in the first five minutes. This is bracing TV...

After making her acting debut at the beginning of the previous decade with Tsangari’s Attenberg, Ariane Labed has carved out an impressive career. The Greek-born French actress has made an impression in Alps, The Lobster, Before Midnight, The Forbidden Room, and more. She recently embarked on her directing debut with the short film Olla. Following a woman’s peculiar journey after answering an online dating request, the film explores relationships, sexuality, and society’s projection on women in visually distinct ways.

Following its Cannes premiere, Labed is now headed to Sundance with the film and we caught up with her discuss what she’s learned about directing while acting, how she interprets the film, what the reactions around the world have been, what it was like learning from Joanna Hogg on The Souvenir films, and a recent festival favorite she’s loved.

The Film Stage: You’ve worked with...

Eight international series to be showcased at the Efm at the Berlinale 2020.

The first two episodes of the Paris-set The Eddy, directed by Damien Chazelle for Netflix, UK romantic comedy Trigonometry, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari for the BBC and HBO, and Stateless, co-created by and starring Cate Blanchett for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, will all world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival’s 2020 Berlinale Series strand.

Formerly known as Drama Series Days, Berlinale Series is open to the public and runs from February 24-16. A further six international series are also being showcased. All are world premieres apart from...

Netflix may get most of the attention, but it’s hardly a one-stop shop for cinephiles who are looking to stream essential classic and contemporary films. Each of the prominent streaming platforms — and there are more of them all the time — caters to its own niche of film obsessives.

From chilling horror fare on Shudder, to the boundless wonders of the Criterion Channel, and esoteric (but unmissable) festival hits on Film Movement Plus and Ovid.tv, IndieWire’s monthly guide will highlight the best of what’s coming to every major streaming site, with an eye towards exclusive titles that may help readers decide which of these services is right for them.

Here’s the best of the best for August 2019.

Amazon Prime

There are some big new movies coming to Amazon Prime this month, but most of these recent Hollywood titles will also be available to stream on Hulu and/or Netflix.

Syllas Tzoumerkas, one of the filmmakers who formed part of the Greek New Wave, believes young filmmakers should remain defiant against norms and conformity when developing a film language unique to themselves.

Speaking during a masterclass at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival entitled “A Very Certain Defiance,” Tzoumerkas told his young audience, participants of European Film Promotion’s Future Frames program, “The word ‘defiance’ can create a path for you in surviving the film industry.”

The director, whose films include 2010 Venice Critics’ Week pic “Homeland,” 2014 Locarno competition film “A Blast,” and this year’s Berlin Panorama player “The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea,” advised them: “You are going to have to create a core – an inner strength – that is non-negotiable because this is what is going to feed you; this what is going to create content.”

He added: “Be defiant against all the sea of opinion, norms, conformity… be defiant against yourself.

One of the latest trends in world cinema is the “Greek Weird Wave”, with films like “Dogtooth” and “Attenberg,” that take reality and push it to its borders, occasionally surpassing the lines of surrealism. Regarding weirdness however, if Greece has a wave, Japan has a tsunami, and has been having one for decades now. With films like “Robo Geisha” and “Dead Sushi”, Noboru Iguchi is a definite member of the genre, and his latest movie, “Slavemen” is a testament to the fact, as it takes the concept of the “masked hero” to its most extreme, despite the fact that gore is totally absent from this film.

Yasuyuki is a true loser. He aspires to become a filmmaker, but is only a cleaner, spending his days mopping floors, and living with his somewhat abusive sister. Nothing seems to improve his life, and things become even worse when, one day at work,...

Tsangari’s film credits include Attenberg and Chevalier.

Award-winning Greek film director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose credits include international festival favourites Attenberg in 2010 and Chevalier in 2015, has signed to direct BBC TV series Trigonometry for Tessa Ross and Juliette Howell’s London-based House Productions.

She will direct the first five episodes of the eight-part series which is written by Duncan Macmillan and Effie Woods.

”[Athina] brings with her a unique cinematic vision which we believe will marry brilliantly with Duncan and Effie’s bold and original scripts,” Ross and Howell told Screen.

Trigonometry is a relationship comedy-drama about a couple who...

“Are you going to rape me or seduce me?” “I am gentleman.” “Rape then.” With clear-cut, witty dialogues such as this one—performed by the fantastic cast in a shrewd, straight-forward and incredibly speedy way—Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest, The Favourite, for many a viewer was their favorite of this year’s Venice competition, on both sides: the Lanthimos-fans as well as -sceptics. This was not surprising, given the film’s high entertainment impact as well as its major momentum. In the end, it got the Grand Jury Prize, but would certainly have deserved a Golden Lion, because this period drama set in the early 18th century is equally splendid in its precise visual composition and breathless editing as it is in the handling of an unsurpassable rhetorical verve. A queer Queen Anne is the main (sulkily ailing) protagonist, with rivaling duo (cousins) of Sarah Churchill (a.k.a. Lady Marlborough...

Emerging filmmakers can parlay even the smallest of financial grants into major career-advancing moves, per director Richard Linklater.

Interviewed by Variety film critic Peter Debruge, the helmer was speaking at the Variety Critics Corner series at the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival. He was referring to the types of funds awarded by the Austin Film Society, a nonprofit organization he established in 1985 in his hometown of Austin, Texas – originally to screen classic and auteur films.

Afs – which is being showcased as part of the Made in Texas program at Karlovy Vary – has grown to own a cinema, manage local soundstages, and provide funding to help Texas-based artists at the script stage, in post, or in any other way that will advance their projects. These modest grants, he said, are a way to incubate or jump-start new films.

Linklater came to Karlovy Vary to accompany Made in Texas, as well as...

After Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos landed an Oscar nomination for “Dogtooth,” his twisted dystopian vision of a family trapped in deranged rituals, his agent took him around town. It was the usual routine: Promising young talent offered numerous pre-conceived projects, with no guarantee that he’d have any control over the final result. “I didn’t really know the landscape,” said Lanthimos in an interview. “I just realized it’s not what I’m interested in. I’d never be able to survive such a situation.”

See More:Cannes Review: With ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer,’ Yorgos Lanthimos Comes to America and Makes the Scariest Movie of His Life

That early decision paid off. After “Dogtooth,” Lanthimos churned out a series of movies that have continued to cement his status as one of the most original, visionary filmmakers working today. His movies present bleak, self-contained universes of despair, and they’re never predictable.

Exclusive: Second edition of event hosted with Greece’s Faliro House will support filmmakers from the region.

The participants for the second edition of the Faliro House Sundance Institute Mediterranean Screenwriters Workshop have been revealed.

The workshop, a collaboration between the Sundance Institute and Christos V Konstantakopoulos’ Greek production company Faliro House, supports emerging filmmakers from Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus (last year’s event is pictured above).

The five-day workshop, held in Costa Navarino, Greece from July 3-9, gives eight filmmakers the chance to work on their feature film scripts with advisors.

The advisors include filmmaker Gyula Gazdag, artistic director for the Sundance Institute in the Us, Lisa Cholodenko (Olive Kitteridge, The Kids Are Alright), Julie Delpy (Before Midnight, 2 Days In Paris), Jeff Nichols (Loving, Take Shelter), recent Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund (The Square, Force Majeure), Ira Sachs (Little Men, Love Is Strange), Zach Sklar (JFK), Eva Stefani (Bathers, Acropolis) and Athina Rachel Tsangari...

Each year, the Sundance Film Festival rolls out an enviable lineup of jury members — billed as “experts in film, art, culture and science” — to dole out awards to the feature-length works shown at the festival. In total, 28 prizes (and sometimes more!) will be announced at a ceremony on January 28 (as ever, Short Film Awards will be announced at a separate ceremony on January 24). The festival has now announced this year’s various jury members, including actors, filmmakers, producers, writers and other luminaries (and, yes, plenty of Sundance alums pop up amongst their ranks).

Additionally, the festival has also announced that actress, comedian, correspondent and podcast host Jessica Williams will host the annual awards. Jones seems poised to have a very busy Sundance indeed, as she also toplines James Strouse’s premiere “The Incredible Jessica James,” which will close out the festival the night before.

The awards, which recognize standout artistic and story elements,...

Paul Federbush, International Director, Feature Film Program at Sundance Institute detailed the Institute’s comprehensive support for emerging filmmakers .

Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery and development of independent artists and audiences. Through its programs, the Institute seeks to discover, support, and inspire independent film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to introduce audiences to their new work.

The entry point to support from the Feature Film Program is its Screenwriting Labs — the Institute’s first artist program — held twice a year at the Sundance Resort in Utah each January and June.The Screenwriters Lab is a five-day writer’s workshop that gives independent screenwriters the opportunity to work intensively on their feature film scripts with the support of established writers in an environment that encourages innovation and creative risk-taking. Through one-on-one story sessions with Creative Advisors,...

Year in Review. Every afternoon, a new wrap-up. Today Glenn on his year with #52FilmsByWomen

The hashtag ‘52FilmsByWomen’ was started by Women in Film as a means of getting people to consciously watch at least one film a week directed by a woman. It seems like a simple mission considering the number of films many of us watch for both work and pleasure, but I have no doubt that of the 10,000+ people who pledged to do it, many didn’t reach the goal. That’s all right, though, because I saw enough for two.

No, really. In 2016, I watched 105 titles including feature films, shorts, and documentaries. They cover classics, new releases, hidden gems, animations, comedy, horror, and from all over the world. Here are...

Ten Observations From My Year Of #52Filmsbywomen

Subverting Toxic Masculinity

We don’t just want more women making films for their fine-tuned insights into the lives...

Here’s your daily dose of an indie film, web series, TV pilot, what-have-you in progress, as presented by the creators themselves. At the end of the week, you’ll have the chance to vote for your favorite.

In the meantime: Is this a project you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments.

Tracks

Logline: A mother waits for the train with her young son. At one point she loses sight of him. The boy is in the tracks. The train is coming. The mother screams.

Elevator Pitch:

The film is based on a true story about a woman whose child got into the train tracks, the train was coming and she started to scream. Then another woman jumped in saved the child but lost her life. It’s set in two different timelines: on one hand we see the young woman from the beginning of her day...

★★★★☆ The famous Bechdel Test - taken from a 1985 comic strip by Alison Bechdel - has over the past few years become an ever more popular barometer to gauge the validity of a film's treatment of women. The new film from Athina Rachel Tsangari, Chevalier spectacularly fails the test by not actually featuring a single female character on screen and yet those interested in equality of gender representation in current cinema would be advised not to overlook it. Eschewing the more outlandish elements of 2010's Attenberg, this is a brilliantly contained and sublimely ridiculous send-up of competitive male egos from a female perspective.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier is the Greek submission to the foreign film category at the 2017 Academy Awards.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier has been selected by the Culture Ministry to represent Greece in the Oscar category for Best Foreign Language Film, 2017.

The film, a social satire taking place entirely on a boat where a group of men compete for macho supremacy, joins the Oscar race after a number of awards in 2015 including best film at the BFI London Film Festival, a jury special mention and the best male award for its group of five leading actors at Sarajevo Film Festival, as well as the special jury prize at the Cartagena International Film Festival.

Award-winning screenwriter and Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular collaborator Efthimis Filippou penned the script in collaboration with Tsangari.

The picture was produced by Faliro House Productions and Tsangari’s own outlet Haos Film with the backing of the Greek Film Centre.

This is the...

A fishing trip soon turns in to a struggle for supremacy among six male friends in this Greek comedy

“Your syntax is shit. And your penis is very, very small.” This double-pronged attack on one man’s prowess, verbal and sexual, comes about two-thirds into this wry comedy from Greece. And it neatly sums up the kind of petty jostling for alpha male supremacy that is skewered brilliantly here by Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of Attenberg, associate producer of Dogtooth.

For a well-heeled group of six men on a fishing trip aboard a luxury yacht, everything is a competition, even before they decide to rate each other’s skills and personal attributes to determine who is “the best in general”. Dental hygiene, flatpack assembly skills, breakfast choices and more easily quantifiable attributes such as physical endowment: everything is scored in the small books that each man guards jealously.

Continue reading.

Writer/director Athina Rachel Tsangari follows her 2010 feature Attenberg with this wry yet colourless study of an all male crew on an Aegean boat-ride back to Athens. Having exhausted their board game options, the yacht bound bunch become stricken with boredom so devise a game called “The Best at Everything”. The contest involves the crew […]

The post Chevalier Review appeared first on HeyUGuys.

Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari is seen as an important part of the current Greek "Weird Wave" of cinema. She produced several of Yorgos Lanthimos' films like Dogtooth, and he helped produce (and acted in) her previous film Attenberg. But there's something worth noting about that film: while Attenberg was unusual, it wasn't exactly "weird". It worked fine as a straight-faced drama, and though it contained some wry humor, it wasn't even all that absurd. Cue Tsangari's newest film Chevalier, of which the same thing can be said. Its main strength isn't so much that it is weird or absurd, but that it is all too believable: a group of men, on a holiday together, have themselves a dick-measuring contest to end all dick-measuring contests....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Captain Fantastic’s Matt Ross wins director prize; animation The Red Turtle wins special prize.Scroll down for full list of winners

Finnish boxer drama The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki, directed by Juho Kuosmanen, has won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.

Review: The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki

After two Cinefondation-selected shorts, Kuosmanen has made his feature debut with this film inspired by the real life of Olli Maki, the first Finn to fight for the world championship in featherweight boxing, who is distracted by his first love on the day of the big fight.

Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola and Eero Milonoff star in the black-and-white film, which shot on 16mm. B-Plan will release in Finland in September, with theatrical releases also secured for Germany, France and Denmark.

The Finland-Germany-Sweden co-production is produced by Aamu Film Company, One Two Films...

A few weeks after Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster finally lands in the United States, it’s only fitting we get the next feature from Dogtooth and Alps producer Athina Rachel Tsangari. Following up Attenberg, her latest film is Chevalier, which follows a group of men at sea who attempt to one-up each other in various, increasingly dangerous games.

We said in our review, “From one of the earliest images of them — in a line, flaunting their catch from the sea — the film finds the group conducting virtually every variation on the dick-measuring contest. Unfortunately, this is why Chevalier is the kind of one-note, overly conceptual art film that says all it has to say within its first five minutes, but attempts to bury it with broad jabs at easy targets.”

Starring Yorgos Kentros, Panos Koronis, Vangelis Mourikis, Makis Papadimitriou, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Sakis Rouvas, Yiannis Drakopoulos, Nikos Orfanos, and Kostas Philippoglou,...

The independent and alternative cinema showcase (Apr 28 - May 7) will have the world premiere of Choi Seung-ho’s controversial Spy Nation.

The 17th Jeonju International Film Festival (Jiff) has announced it will open with Robert Burdeau’s Born To Be Blue, starring Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker.

South Korea’s second largest film festival - focused on independent and alternative cinema - Jiff will close with the remastered version of Ryoo Seung-wan’s feature directorial debut Die Bad.

New Jiff festival director Lee Choong-jik said: “Ryoo Seung-wan’s film was in to the first edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival. It is now in its 17th edition and Ryoo Seung-wan has grown into a director who represents Korean cinema. Director Ryoo still has the independent film spirit, even when he’s making commercial films. That spirit is something we have in common. We’re reviving the 10-day festival’s Closing Film and expanding outdoor screenings, and it...

There are few narrative tropes seemingly less interesting in today’s film world than the “men behaving like children” subset of film comedy. Be it the Apatow suspended adolescence comedies or the vulgar auteurism (using the actual definition of both of those words and not the confoundingly ridiculous critical term) of Todd Phillips, cinema has become flooded with tales of men at their worst seeking some sort of redemption while never quite maturing in the process. That is, until director Athina Rachel Tsangari jumped into the fray.

While fellow Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has garnered the majority of headlines out of the seemingly still young New Wave of Greek cinema, it has been Tsangari (who helped produce Lanthimos’ masterpiece, Dogtooth) who has brought to the screen some of the most exciting films out of Greece in ages. Debuting with the impossible-to-see The Slow Business Of Going, it took her roughly...

Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari is seen as an important part of the current Greek "Weird Wave" of cinema. She produced several of Yorgos Lanthimos' films like Dogtooth, and he helped produce (and acted in) her previous film Attenberg. But there's something worth noting about that film: while Attenberg was unusual, it wasn't exactly "weird". It worked fine as a straight-faced drama, and though it contained some wry humor, it wasn't even all that absurd. Cue Tsangari's newest film Chevalier, of which the same thing can be said. Its main strength isn't so much that it is weird or absurd, but that it is all too believable: a group of men, on a holiday together, have themselves a dick-measuring contest to end all dick-measuring contests....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari is seen as an important part of the current Greek "Weird Wave" of cinema. She produced several of Yorgos Lanthimos' films like Dogtooth, and he helped produce (and acted in) her previous film Attenberg. But there's something worth noting about that film: while Attenberg was unusual, it wasn't exactly "weird". It worked fine as a straight-faced drama, and though it contained some wry humor, it wasn't even all that absurd. Cue Tsangari's newest film Chevalier, of which the same thing can be said. Its main strength isn't so much that it is weird or absurd, but that it is all too believable: a group of men, on a holiday together, have themselves a dick-measuring contest to end all dick-measuring contests....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Strand Releasing has acquired all Us rights to Athina Rachel Tsangari's "Chevalier," the comedy about the war of male egos that premiered at Locarno before scooping two prizes in Sarajevo, and Best Film at the London Film Festival. Tsangari's flippant comedy "Attenberg," from 2010, was a dark treat about a sexually precocious young woman obsessed with wildlife documentaries. This time with "Chevalier" she skewers male one-upmanship as a group of pals on a yacht fishing and diving vacation agree to compete in a game of grading everything about each other; the winner will accrue the most points at the end of the trip. They take this contest so seriously (as do their support staff) that they monitor everything from cholesterol and snoring levels to cabinet construction and literal dick measuring. "Chevalier" is yet another absurdly hilarious comedy of gender dynamics that could put Tsangari closer on the arthouse map to the more fanciful.

Chevalier Greek film Chevalier won the Best Film award at London Film Festival tonight. Robert Eggers' The Witch - which premiered at Sundance - won the Sutherland prize for Best First Feature.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari - who won plaudits for her previous film Attenberg - skewers masculinity with Chevalier, by focusing on six men who decide to play a game of oneupmanship after a fishing trip runs into difficulty.

The president of the jury, Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski said “Chevalier is a study of male antagonism seen though the eyes of a brave and original filmmaker. With great formal rigour and irresistible wit, Athena Rachel Tsangari has managed to make a film that is both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of western humanity”.

Pawlikowski was joined on the jury by producer Christine Vachon, actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristin Scott-Thomas, and director and.

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Woody Allen is currently shooting digitally for the first time on his new film, Vittorio Storaro tells Variety:

“I had seen that the Sony F65 was capable of recording beautiful images in 4K and 16 bit-colour depth in 1:2, which is my favorite composition. So when Woody called me this year asking me to be the cinematographer of his new film with the working title ‘Wasp 2015,’ my decision was already made. I convinced him to record the film in digital, so we can begin our journey together in the digital world. It’s time now for the Sony F65!”

Tangerine stars Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor will campaign for Oscars,...

At one point in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s "Chevalier," a group of guys on a yachting expedition take turns listening to one of their friends whisper erotic stories so they’ll get aroused and he can take pictures of their erections. They then compare those photos, judging each other’s penises on length, engorgement, and general spryness. In other words: to pass the time while floating in the Aegean, these idle rich dudes have a literal dick-measuring contest. This is the kind of bizarre-yet-believable behavior that anyone who’s seen Tsangari’s previous film, "Attenberg," would expect from “Chevalier.” Like her fellow Greek filmmaker and occasional collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos (director of “Dogtooth” and “The Lobster”), Tsangari favors characters who only make sense within the context of the strange stories and spaces that she creates on-screen. Here, working with Lanthimos’ regular co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, Tsangari assembles a circle of...

This week sees the red carpet rolling into the centre of the Ontario capital for the fortieth edition of the Toronto Film Festival. Giving a headache to keen festival-goers everywhere the anniversary line-up boasts a staggering 289 feature titles including a whopping 132 world premières. Bookending the festival will be Jean-Marc Vallée's Demolition, which kicks things off on Thursday 10 September, and Paco Cabezas' Mr. Right, which draws proceedings to a close ten days later. The latter is a murderous rom-com starring Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell, the former stars Jack Gyllenhaal, grief-stricken and prone to random acts of destruction. But with such an enormous roster of films to choose from, it doesn't all hinge on the star-studded awards vehicles that may or not make their bow.

While the likes of Ridley Scott's The Martian, Stephen Frears' The Program and recent Venice bows such as The Danish Girl and...