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Inventive and sassy – one of the best in a long time – 2021’s TIFF poster featuring Mrs. Tependris1 in her pink overall, kicking off the event with a clapperboard, perfectly evoked the spirit of this 62nd edition: a vibrant, cutting edge festival, open to diversity and giving women centre stage. 

After last year’s online edition, TIFF, the country’s most important film festival, was back on the big screen again, with a live audience and a host of filmmakers all there to share their thoughts and emotions. Despite a sudden rise in pandemic numbers in early November, TIFF successfully took place from the 4th to the 14th, rigorously respecting all health protocols. Its legendary parties and festive gatherings, alas, had to be cancelled, but the public’s enthusiasm was enough to fill the festival’s venues despite all odds. 

Responsive and inventive, Orestis Andreadakis, TIFF’s artistic director since 2016, and his team, were able to perfectly manage this complex situation, from a logistical point of view, by offering an online option as well, and in terms of content, by creating an exciting, demanding and questioning program open to the many issues of the moment. 

“In a time of constant fluctuations, of sudden changes in the health situation possibly modifying projects and programs from one minute to the next, one must be ready to reinvent oneself, every day, changing and adapting the ‘rules of the game’ to the situation of the moment,” explained Andreadakis. 

In line with these thoughts, this year’s Festival motto: Let’s rewrite the rules of the game! was inspired by Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Regle du Jeu. Moreover, drawing on this crucial film, ten young Greek artists were invited to create one piece each for the Festival’s traditional figurative exhibition. 

Besides the Agora’s activities, the Festival’s lively market, TIFF’s various sections offered us a wide film selection from all over the world. Structurally the Festival did not undergo any major changes this year except for slightly reducing the number of screenings, due to sanitary regulations. 

A category A festival, TIFF’s International Competition hosted 14 young directors from Greece and abroad, running for the prestigious Golden Alexander Award. Feature films from the Balkans and the Mediterranean area were respectively shown in the popular Balkan Survey and Meet the Neighbors strands, while Greek cinema’s recent production as well as a number of tributes were presented in a big ad hoc strand: the Greek Film Festival. What is more, taking into account the young generation’s fresh, uninhibited approach, the Podcast section opened up to new visual forms, while Open Horizons offered us a wide overview of last year’s world cinema. Shorts were included in all the program’s sections while genre film fans could enjoy the Round Midnight shows.

A significant amendment was made, changing the status of Film Forward – a section dedicated to bold, unconventional filmmaking – from non-competitive to competitive (in addition to the International Competition and Meet the Neighbors). It was a weighty decision fully reflecting the Festival’s concern to support demanding, niche works struggling to find distribution. The new awards should be a first step in that direction.  

Looking back over the ten intense days – a whirlwind of impressions and experiences – the most inspiring was the endless queues outside the Olympeion Theatre, where young enthusiasts stood for hours hoping to attend one of the unique masterclasses on editing held by Claire Atherton, Walter Merz, Giorgos Mavropsaridis, Roland Weiss, Lampis Xaralambidis or Ane Esterwood and Janus Bileskof, to name just a few. Exploring a crucial aspect of filmmaking, this year’s special: In the cut! Editing and its secrets, was definitely a huge success! 

Particularly sensitive to women’s filmmaking, TIFF dedicated a tribute to Binka Zhelyazkova (1921-2011), the first woman director in Bulgaria and one of the few in the world in the 1950s. Thanks to curator Dimitris Kerkinos’ passionate collaboration with the Bulgarian film archive, her complete opus, created between 1957 and 1982, was screened for the first time abroad. 

Idealistic and uncompromising, Zhelyazkova was constantly boycotted and censored for daring to criticise the faults of a regime that she, as a young partisan, had fought to establish. TIFF’s retrospective was a crucial first step towards the wider recognition of a filmmaker who fearlessly made her mark as an artist, citizen and woman. Zhelyazkova built her exemplary body of work with her husband Hristo Ganev, the author of almost all her screenplays. Her style swings between expressionist rigor, the freedom and lightness of the Nouvelle Vague, traits of neo-realism and a distinct taste for allegory. Her intense, often satirical stories point a finger at all kinds of cowardice, opportunism and defeatism, finally turning her career into an ordeal in communist Bulgaria. Despite everything, Zhelyazkova managed to compete at Cannes, a sensation for the time, with The Last Word (1973), an all-female film. But the regime won the day and Zhelyazkova spent the last years of her life banned from ever making another movie.

When We Were Young

The first title I came across during the retrospective, When We Were Young (1961) immediately grabbed me with its surprising inventiveness, the finesse of its emotional approach and Zhelyazkova’s impressive mastery of all cinematic means. After a remarkable debut with Life Flows Quietly By (1957), which she co-directed with Ganev, When We Were Young fully bears her imprint. With tenderness and compassion Zhelyazkova portrays a young generation burnt out by war. “It is not for the dark that we evoke this memory, (…) But for the little lights that lit up suddenly, lived quietly and died unobtrusively (…)‘, she says in the prologue while, against an abstract black background, we see, one after the other, the ID cards of young partisans who fell during World War II. 

Filmed in black and white, When We Were Young tells the story of a group of young people who, with great enthusiasm, but clumsy and inexperienced, form a resistance cell to fight the Nazis in Sofia by any means. With all the modesty and innocence of their youth, two of them, Veska and Dima, fall in love, unaware of their imminent fate. The narrative is full of twists and turns but what makes this film unique is its poignant lyricism and elegant staging. The camera, an instrument as agile as a bird’s feather in Zhelyazkova’s hands, follows a clear vision where every formal choice perfectly translates the sense of the narrative.

A completely deserted city under the blazing sun is the movie’s dystopian opening; from a bird’s eye view, the camera films the empty streets, shifting between blocks of flats to then focus with a high angle shot on the small figure of a woman walking all alone. Under the intermittent sound of the air-raid sirens, one hears the rhythmic pounding of the girl’s heels on the pavement. The camera, now at street level, follows her. Veska, holding a flower in her hand, walks quickly through empty streets, past the ruins of bombed-out houses. In another part of the city, a young man with a newspaper under his arm is also walking briskly. While filming him, the camera flies upward for an aerial view. With a series of dizzying high and low angle shots sweeping across the city’s sky to end up framing each of the two characters, the camera’s movements are never random but perfectly describe with ethereal lyricism the enthusiastic yet immature state of mind of the two heroes, full of dreams and hopes that are often, literally, up in the air. When the two of them finally meet, Dimo still has his newspaper under his arm, but the flower, Veska’s sign of recognition, has already crumbled in the palm of her hand. Fragility and hope meet in this opening scene of the film, the starting point of a narrative arc that will take the young protagonists from the carefree attitude of their youth to the disillusionment of an early and painful maturity. 

A sincere tribute to the heroes of the resistance, the film is not without self-criticism; had it not won first prize at the Moscow festival, it probably never would have been released in Bulgaria. Zhelyazkova paid the price, however. She had to wait for five years before she could produce her next film, The Tied-Up Balloon (1967), her masterpiece.

With the advent of a new generation of self-confident, cosmopolitan, talented filmmakers, Greek cinema has drawn considerable international attention in the last decade. 

It seemed like an excellent opportunity to take a closer look at the Festival’s offerings of national cinema. New voices with strong personalities have emerged over the past year with their first, amazing films. These young talents are: Jacqueline Lentzou and Araceli Lemos, both invited to the Festival’s International Competition, and Yorgos Goussis, who presented his film as a world premiere in the Fast Forward section. Three very different filmmakers, each of their stories focused on a couple. A father and daughter, two sisters, a woman and a man alone, are the protagonists of three films that try to explore not only the importance of affection but also, and above all, the meaning of our existence. 

Following her studies at the London film school, Athens born auteur Lentzou came to the attention of international audiences with a series of shorts selected by festivals such as Toronto, Locarno and Cannes. Her feature debut, Moon, 66 Questions, which premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlinale in 2021, is proof of Lentzou’s remarkable talent. 

Moon, 66 Questions

The autobiographical background to Moon, 66 Questions is a wonderful story of filial love, compassion and forgiveness. Through the ordeal of illness, an estranged father and his daughter grow together on a difficult journey which culminates in a surprising conciliation. Intimate, moving and poetic yet never melodramatic, Moon, 66 Questions is a perfectly balanced work.

Words Don’t Come Easy: this old pop song’s refrain during the film’s end credits, perfectly defines the crux of the film; Paris and Artemis never learned how to express their feelings to each other. Paris, the father, in his 50s, was always cold, intransigent and detached toward his only daughter, Artemis, who, having long since gone to study abroad, had also lost touch with him. The story begins in medias res. Following a frantic call from Athens, Artemis drops everything to rush to her father’s bedside. Severely afflicted with multi-sclerosis, once discharged from hospital, Paris needs round-the-clock assistance. Despite occasional visits and vague promises of help from her aunts and uncles, Artemis is left completely alone. Even her mother, Paris’s ex-wife, remains on the sidelines, and Mister Iakovos, her father’s closest friend, only pays him a courtesy visit now and then. But the girl doesn’t give up. The story is shown from her point of view. Firm yet vulnerable, responsible yet playful, Artemis is stunningly portrayed by Sofia Kokkali, awarded best actress at TIFF. 

Summer days are exhausting and time seems to stand still in the vast, luxurious flat by the sea, where Artemis finds herself confined with her semi-paralysed father. She believes that he can improve and every day fights to help him get up, walk and eat. In her spare time, she wanders alone from room to room, touching objects, reliving memories, inventing childish games to fill the silence and loneliness around her. As she moves, the camera constantly explores her lively eyes looking off-screen, full of concern, expectations and hope. Now and then reality blends with a mental space made of memories and scraps of images from the past recorded on old VHS tapes: a car, building or deserted beach from her father’s video diary with Artemis’ comments in voice-over. 

Paris seems even more distant than before, a total stranger. A jealously guarded unvoiced family secret undermines their mutual bond. In the arena of this emotional void, Lentzou skilfully stages the two protagonist’s bodies. As if in hand-to-hand combat, Paris and Artemis prop each other up with tremendous effort. Completely dependent on his daughter, Paris clings to her with spasmodic movements. Taking a few steps is an adventure. Lazaros Georgakopoulos’ portrayal of a body ravaged by illness is frighteningly natural and utterly moving. Paris answers Artemis’ prosaic questions mostly through gestures and vague mumbling, and as his situation stabilises, an almost childlike complicity begins to develop between them. A joyful ride on a wheelchair Paris isn’t supposed to use, or Artemis spilling her favourite ice-cream all over her face and making him smile, are tiny episodes revealing their growing closeness. Despite its subject’s gravity, there is nothing gloomy in this graceful, subtly humorous film, shaped with remarkable restraint. 

Step by step, the screenplay guides us through a number of clues that Artemis cannot yet read until, one day, opening up a forgotten drawer, the hidden truth she was unconsciously looking for finally turns up. Tarot cards, used to read one’s fate, meaningfully introduce the story’s four chapters. It is no coincidence that the last one is announced by the ‘magician’s’ card. At the end, a miracle takes place. Not the one that Artemis had hoped for, but just as powerful. As we finally see father and daughter appeased, holding each other blissfully, we cannot help but shed a tear.

After studying film at Calarts, US based Araceli Lemos, directed a series of remarkable fiction and documentary shorts, set both in Greece and the US. Shaped by an acute sense of observation, her first enthralling feature, Holy Emy, which premiered at Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente in 2021, blends mystic events with everyday life. The protagonist Emy, a disquieting Filipino girl living in Athens with her older sister Teresa, mesmerises the film’s narrative when, in sudden fits of tears, she cries blood, her powerful, mysterious body proving that we can’t control everything through rational thinking. Inspired by Lemos’ autobiographical memories and co-written with Giulia Caruso, Holy Emy tackles a controversial subject involving healing, sanctity and sanity. Shifting from admiration to awe and from hope to fear, our relationship with those who allegedly have healing powers is, in fact, utterly ambiguous. 

Holy Emy

Holy Emy is set within the Filipino community in Athens, granting us a precious insight into a widely unknown territory, never portrayed in Greek cinema before. Lemos’ passionate field research and concern allowed her to build trust in the community, which eagerly joined the production process. Filippinos, mostly women, emigrated to Greece in the 1990s during the country’s economic boom, and a younger Filipino generation was born and raised in Athens. This very discreet group remains rather aloof, with its own habits, rituals and meeting places. 

The film starts in this social environment to then embark on a long ride through some of the city’s neighbourhoods; from the girls’ house in the centre to Piraeus’ fish market where they work; from a luxurious villa on a remote beach to an impressive Good Friday procession, finally ending up in a hospital. Fluid and inquisitive, Lemos’ camera explores a multi-faceted urban space embracing the point of view of its troubled protagonists caught between the suffocating interference of the Filipino’s Catholic congregation, which sees Emy as a witch, and their efforts to integrate into Greek society. A skilfully disquieting soundscape overshadows the film’s atmosphere from the start with a sense of tension and unease, while the narrative builds gradually, step by step to its final escalation. 

The story’s emotional pivot is the sisters’ intense possessive relationship. Beyond their unwavering affection they couldn’t be more different. While Teresa is conciliating, receptive, willing to compromise and curious about life, Emy is reserved, solitary, possessed by paranormal faculties she is still unable to control. People around her find her both fascinating and frightening. Hasmine Kilip as Teresa, and Abigail Loma as Emy, stunningly convey their characters’ troubled feelings.

In a hostile environment where everyone tries to profit from them in every possible way, the two girls strive to protect each other the best they can. Accordingly, Teresa’s Greek boyfriend dumps her as soon as he realises she is pregnant, but shows up again out of the blue when he senses he could eventually make money with Emy’s blood tears. Although Emy thinks she can find a job lodging in the beautiful mansion of a wealthy ailing old woman, she soon realises that the selfish landlady only wants to exploit Emy’s healing power by “selling” it at a high price to a whole entourage of sick people. 

The meticulous narrative, with its many subplots and perfectly drawn side characters, describes a veritable rite of passage for the two girls. After facing adversity and danger, both girls confidently enter the adult world: Teresa learns to accept her motherhood and Emy embraces her diversity, no longer ashamed of who she is. The film ends with a wonderfully liberating scene where Emy cries her tears of blood openly on a bus full of passengers who don’t bat an eyelid. By sparingly and imaginatively weaving elements of magical realism and body horror into her film, Lemos offers us a beautiful parable about diversity, showing us how, even before being accepted by others, we must learn to accept ourselves.2

Goussis’ film take us far away from Athens. A woman and a man meet in winter on their way to Cefalonia Island and decide to spend some time together; this is the bottom line of Magnetic Fields (2021), graphic novelist Goussis’ feature debut. This low budget film, which premiered at TIFF’s Fast Forward section, really made the difference: witty, touching and delicate, it deeply moved and charmed many festival juries, winning Best Greek Film, among other awards.

The film’s protagonists, Elena and Antonis, are two lonely, lost individuals who, as if by an invisible law of human magnetism, attract each other through their mutual solitude. Elena’s character is whimsical, and owes much to her interpreter’s real life personality: Elena Topalidpou, originally a ballet dancer and a cult figure in the Greek film scene. Always dressed in black, Elena, in her 40s, has the slender body of a dancer and a taut face with huge black eyes veiled by melancholy and a touch of quirkiness. Like a ballerina’s, her fine black hair is tied back at the neck. Antonis, played by Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos, is a tall bearded man with the candid gaze of a child. He sticks out in the wintry landscape with his yellow duck jacket and fire-red woollen cap. Both seem to be walking a tightrope. They have reached a crucial moment in their lives where, all at once, everything feels wrong for no reason. 

Magnetic Fields

Elena no longer recognises her own face in the mirror, and while she is supposed to be driving from Athens to a dance workshop in Thessaloniki, she turns around and sets off on an adventure, or rather, drifts away. She would appear to have all the ingredients for happiness; a son she adores, and a husband she’s still in love with, but she’s restless and no longer wants to dance. She’d like to sing. Her attempts at performing a song with her broken shaky voice are both hilarious and touching. Then, she casually mentions that her voice has recovered considerably since her operation. We never know anything more about it. After briefly talking to Antonis on the ferry, she senses he may be the perfect companion for her aimless journey and offers to drive him around.

Two ‘objects’, each closely associated with the protagonists, are crucial to keeping this unusual road movie going: Elena’s car, an old Golf she calls ‘Georges’ and a mysterious metal box Antonis drags around with him. The box hides, so to speak, one more character inside, namely the bones of a distant aunt that Antonis promised to bury in her native Cefalonia. When the local cemetery officer refuses to help them, the plot takes an essential turn as our two heroes decide to look for another stunning burial spot for the aunt’s bones. Cefalonia is full of spectacular places but, for one reason or another, none turn out to be suitable. Is it really so, or do they have an unconscious desire to prolong their journey together? The couple’s chemistry is perfect and its restraint, modesty and tenacity reminds us of some of Kaurismäki’s iconic couples. In their laconic dialogues, each and every word seems precious, carefully chosen but also difficult. The staggering elocution, the anti-naturalist pauses, the jerky, exaggerated laughter often break the codes of realism, yet this theatrical mannerism is never overplayed. Both performances are strikingly sensitive and graceful. Elena and Antonis never touch, kiss or make love. Their bond is much deeper, their quest more spiritual. The couple’s intimacy is wonderfully created through their relation to the island’s magnificent landscape. Director Goussis skilfully alternates close shots of the pair with very wide ones, where their car is a tiny spot moving through the breathtaking scenery, but the sound of their conversation is still close. Other takes, in contrast, are shaky, grainy, filmed from afar. The music, used sparingly, underlines the story’s droll melancholy. 

Far from any cliché, Cefalonia is often rainy, cloudy and foggy. In this hushed, wintry atmosphere the island is like a cocoon for the protagonists, welcoming them gently with all its astonishing beauty and calm, finally helping them to a new start in life. Shot in just one week, this low budget film shows us that a remarkable movie can be made with very limited means if someone has a solid point of view and a strong story to tell. 

Another film also made with very limited means but with great ambition is Destello Bravío (Mighty Flash) by Ainhoa Rodríguez. Also included in TIFF’s Film Forward section, Destello Bravío reveals the riveting auteur of one the most incisive feature debuts of 2021. With a very distinctive touch, Rodriguez paints the fresco of a small rural community in Extremadura (Spain), interweaving everyday life and fantastic elements in an atmosphere tinged with mystery and compassion.

Destello Bravío

A lake at dawn, shot at a very wide angle, is the film’s unsettling opening scene; two women shown in silhouette dance and stagger in the distance as their boisterous voices echo in the landscape. Still drunk after a wedding party, the two friends are laughing, joking and have no intention of allowing their fun to come to an end. One of them is Carmen, nicknamed Cita, the film’s main character, a friendly, chubby woman in her 50s, married to a bigoted man she has had to put up with all her life without loving him. Despite appearances, Cita goes through a major existential crisis. Deep sadness flows over her face whenever someone treats her with true affection. She is a nurse, and while lovingly taking care of an old lady, Carmen tells her about an enchanted place called Alilù, the lost paradise of her childhood’s imagination. In this ensemble film, Rodriguez offers us an intimate, perceptive depiction of what it means for a woman to grow up and grow old. Delving behind appearances, far from a conventional representation of femininity, memories, hopes, fears, desires and sexual impulses emerge from the images with liberating power. The result is an extraordinary gallery of characters so real and tangible that they feel unique and extraordinary.

As well as Carmen, the storyline also follows the fate of several other women in the village. There is Ida, a slightly handicapped girl who records and listens to her own voice and goes around selling churros at all hours. There is Maria who, suddenly widowed, gives up her job at a rich landowner’s finca, and goes back home to face her loneliness. Or the village’s fortune teller, whose only company is a bird in a cage. We eventually come across a group of elegant ladies as well, who meet in each other’s houses to drink tea and eat biscuits, or in church to take care of the clothes of the Virgin’s statue. Still coursing through these women’s mature bodies is an unbridled libido that is joyously and unexpectedly unleashed in one of the film’s most iconic scenes, when a group of classy friends, with pearl necklaces and silk blouses, fall into a kind of Bacchanalian ecstasy at the end of a normal meal. With a sophisticated cinematic approach, the camera embraces the women’s carnality as they sensually move through the space in a freeing dance, touching and caressing themselves tenderly. An eclectic soundtrack alternating electronic music with folk songs accompanies the film, creating a mood that is simultaneously sassy and disquieting. 

Destello Bravío

Played exclusively by non-professionals actors, Destello Bravío was built on a complex process of guided improvisations that shaped the screenplay’s backbone. Truly touching performances reveal the director’s ability to build strong emotional bonds with the film’s participants. The images are equally impressive. Filmed entirely in still shots, the careful framing and painterly set compositions evoke the grandiose austerity of the Spanish masters. Using only natural light, interiors are steeped in a hypnotising dimness, where people are portrayed with an absolute poise that makes time stand still. Exterior spaces, mostly shot with a wide angle lens, look beautifully otherworldly. Yet classicism is turned upside down in Rodriguez’s saucy, subversive work through a confident and inspired cinematic eye. Caught between the harshness of rural life and a relentless globalisation, the film’s second protagonist is the village itself, which at night turns into a deserted, ghostly place, every noise hinting at potential danger. Still, wonders are possible and the film’s heroines are determined to never give up. In these gloomy nights a sudden and ineffable splendour – a mighty flash – may streak across the sky, leaving those who see it breathless, their lives changed forever.

Environment is crucial in the next Film Forward film as well. Over the years, director and visual artist, Yuri Ancarani, has developed a very distinctive cinematic language. Through a grandiose and rigorous mise en scène, he often ventures into secret physical and mental spaces, creating wondrous epiphanies out of the invisible. Atlantide, his latest film, is no exception. Skilfully fusing fiction and documentary into a dreamlike atmosphere, Atlantide is a cry of love for the frail beauty of the Venetian lagoon threatened by mankind’s actions and the sea’s overwhelming power. To the rhythm of powerful electronic sounds in line with the speed of the motorboats and the joie de vivre of the film’s protagonists, the film takes us on an intoxicating sensory journey.

Beyond Venice’s splendour, the lagoon’s countless islands and wild landscape are hard to access, fascinating and mysterious. Here, the teeming life of an aloof community has its own rules, values and rituals. While the elderly still try hard to cultivate small vegetable gardens, the young want to have fun, and most of all, love speed. In their motorboats, or ‘barchini’, they challenge each other to fierce illegal races, breaking every maritime rule. Our guide on the water is Daniele, a slender, blond young man from the secluded Sant’ Erasmo island, who dreams of a different life. 

Atlantide

Stern, taciturn, and an outsider, he might not have enough money, the right look or the right girl to win the approval of a large group of friends who head to techno parties at night in their super-powerful ‘barchini’, or go swimming in the daytime. But motorboats are not only used for leisure by young people, as the film shows, thereby breaking a taboo and revealing the backdrop of drug trafficking in the lagoon. Always accompanied by faithful girlfriend Maila, who is ready to do anything for him, Daniele keeps to himself. But if he wants to race, like the others, he needs a powerful engine. With Maila’s help, he steals one, never imagining the consequences. As the film follows the change in Daniele’s character, the documentary approach gradually fades out.

While dialogues are minimal throughout, the image takes centre stage; skilful framing transforms each scene into an authentic tableau vivant, while the director’s distinct taste for symmetrical compositions gives this forceful work an unexpected Renaissance feel. Ancarani’s camera vibrantly captures the sensation of speed on the sea in summer, the sun’s playful reflections on the water, the boy’s tanned skin and the vivid green meadow. In winter, his sensitive camerawork captures fascinating light galaxies on black seawater created by the illumination of Venice by night.

In the meantime, Daniele now has a powerful boat, and sets off, like many before him, to conquer Venice, chasing his forbidden dreams at the risk of losing himself. Ancarani subtly portrays his protagonist’s progressive annihilation by shifting from a realistic tone to an increasingly surreal one. A heated affair with a beautiful tourist, who dances wildly on his boat like a frantic mermaid, looks like a bad omen. In the pitch black night, Daniele decides at last to challenge his own destiny. 

Atlantide

The finale takes us elsewhere, thematically as well as visually. Beyond Daniele’s tragic fate, we see the bigger picture: threatened by rising water, Venice’s future is at stake. When graffiti on a poorly lit wall shows the words “only water”, the world literally turns upside down. A simple 90-degree rotation of the image creates a frenzied illusion, transforming reality into a futuristic space of uncanny beauty. Ancarani takes us on an unpreceded psychedelic trip through a crazy nocturnal race along Venice’s canals. From this reversed perspective, Venice suddenly becomes a submerged city, all her wonderful palazzos shining on the water’s mirroring surface in a way we could never have imagined. While Francesco Fantini and Lorenzo Senni’s gripping electronic soundtrack echoes in the dark, we still cling astonished to this ghostly view until we reach the open sea and the lights of dawn with a sense of relief and hope. Yet Ancarani’s prophetic images will haunt us for a long time.

Endnotes

  1. Mrs. Tependris is a cult caricature figure invented by Greek painter and multimedia artist Kostantinos Kakanias.
  2. Holy Emy won the Thessaloniki JF Costopoulos Foundation award and the WIFT Award