The Greek Film Festival is back. Greece, and Greek film, has been living in interesting times and, as the country makes its way towards what has to be a different future, Greek filmakers have responded to crisis with great daring and inventiveness.

Our festival reflects this new energy and presents some of the most exciting new films alongside a modest masterpiece of Greek resistance. In 1974, at the lowest point of the Colonel’s dictatorship, Jules Dassin hustled his famous friends into a warehouse in New York and made The Rehearsal, a film bursting with energy, anger and wonderful songs.

Greek filmakers are now, in their own way, doing something similar: making films without the usual funding structures, often without studios but with an urgent need to understand and communicate their own culture and their own time. 

It’s an exciting time for Greek Cinema. Come and see.

Friday 28 November

The Enemy Within O Ehthros Mou
Yorgos Tsemberopoulos • Greece, 2013 • 107 Minutes • DCP
Greek, English Sub-Titles
Cast: Manolis Mavromatakis, Maria Zorba, Yiorgos Gallos
Q&A with the director

Kostas is a good man, an easy-going father who likes people and is liked. But when his house is broken into and his daughter raped he has the thoughts we all would have. The police are useless and, while his family cope with their trauma privately he feels he has to act. We follow him through the very mean streets of vigilante Athens, through revenge, regret and towards equilibrium in this completely involving, humane and honest film. Best Director Hellenic Film Academy Awards 2014, Audience Prize, Galway, awards at Paris, Nashville, Split.

Saturday 29 November

Wild Duck Agriopapia
Yiannis Sakaridis • Greece 2013 • 88 minutes • DCP
Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Alexandros Logothetis, Themis Bazaka, Giorgos Pyrpassopoulos, Elias Logothetis, Yannis Stankoglou, Efi Tsapareli.
Q&A with the director

In a Subtle echo the 2005 "Greek Watergate," two telecom engineers investigate hacker activity and make a scandalous discovery.
For his first feature film, veteran editor Sakaridis developed a project with Attenberg star Vangelis Mourikis, but, in the Greek crisis of 2009, funding fell through so Sakaridis assembled a crew of friends and former collaborators, and took to the streets for a 23-day, guerilla-style shoot of a story of Greece’s crisis seen from the inside. It’s an elegant and intimate film in which the political is personal.

Sunday 30 November

A.C.A.B. ALL CATS ARE BRILLIANT?
Constantina Voulgari • Greece 2012 • 88 minutes • DCP
Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Maria Georgiadou, Dimitris Xanthopoulos, Dimitris Piatas, Themis Bazaka

Like most young Greeks, Electra is making her life up as she goes along – babysitting, flyposting her art, talking, listening and wondering what she or anybody else can do about things. We follow her encounters with the police, her imprisoned boyfriend, her community and her puzzled, concerned parents in one of the most accurate, funniest and most heartbreaking scene of Greek family life ever filmed. Voulgari’s film has a sceptical and ironic view of optimism but is committed to it all the same.

Monday 1 December

The Rehearsal
Jules Dassin • USA 1974 • 92 minutes • 35mm • Black and White. 
English and Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Melina Mercouri, Arthur Miller, Laurence Oliver, Olympia Dukakis, Maximillian Schell, Lillian Hellman, Mikis Theodorakis.

When students of the Athens Polytechnic rose up against the Colonels’ Junta, Dassin, in exile, gathered a cast including his wife Melina Mercouri, Mikis Theodorakis, Laurence Oilver, Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman and shot this inspiring account of the students heroism. It features the great resistance music of the time, songs that Greeks still sing and a magnificent sense of a nation’s resistance and hope. The Colonels fell and the film was not released. In a print from the Greek Film Archive, this is a chance to see Dassin’s favourite of all his films.

Tuesday 2 December

SEPTEMBER (Original title)
Penny Panayotopoulou • Greece 2013 • 99 minutes • DCP
Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Nikos Diamandis, Kora Karvouni, Youlika Skafida, Maria Skoula.

A gentle film about loneliness in the suburbs of Athens. Anna’s life revolves around her dog and she is devasted when it dies. She reaches out to a family because her dog used to play in their garden and is welcomed until they realise there are limits to the friendship. The family’s settled world has no room for lonely Anna despite the tender friendship between her and the mother. Karvouni won Best Actress of the Hellenic Film Academy for September. A sad film with a hopeful ending.

Wednesday 3 December

45m2
Stratos Tzitzis • Greece 2010 • 80 minutes • Beta
Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Efi Logginou, Rania Ekonomidou, Antinoos Albanis

Christina is 23 and wants a room of her own unlike her friends, who are happy to live at home on their mothers’ cooking and spending their minimum wages going out. With only enough for two months, she rents a 45-metre-square apartment and begins to work free from the assumptions of others and the endemic corruption of Greek public life. This is a precisely observed and coherent portrait of Greece as it is now, from handbag shops to rotten boroughs.

Thursday 4 December

Miss Violence
Alexandros Avranas •Greece 2013 • 98 minutes • DCP
Greek with English Subtitles
Cast: Kostas Antalopoulos, Constantinos Athanasiades, Chloe Bolota, Martha Bouziouri.

On her 11th birthday, Angeliki jumps from a balcony to her death with a smile on her face. Angeliki’s family insist it was an accident. What is the secret that young Angeliki took with her? How can Social Services understand what happens in clean, orderly homes like this? Avranas says of hs own powerful film: ‘I always wonder who has the power: the one who strikes or the one who feels the pain? The harshest violence is that of silence. Of the unspoken.’ Silver Lion, Fedora and Arca Awards, Venice.