Performative excess, grotesque or stilted physicalities and stringent visual means are all common ingredients within a significant new chapter in Greek cinema. Its advent can be traced back to two cornerstone films made in the wake of political unrest and economic woes: Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 film Dogtooth and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s 2010 film Attenberg. Both were independently made and highly influential – they are the first entries into the so-called “weird wave”, a glib and indistinct moniker that’s been bandied about persistently in conversations about contemporary Greek cinema. But is it merely a vestment serving a classificatory impulse, privileging generic similarities over culturally determined imaginaries? Or is there a pattern to the weirdness of contemporary Greek cinema?
More and more filmmakers are picking up this strange new baton, and while not necessarily aping the absurdist style of Lanthimos and Tsangari, they contribute to an aesthetically diverse, polymorphic new movement that resists neat categorisation. Contemporary Greek filmmaking operates across, Elina Psikou’s and Christos Nikou’s . These films exhibit repressive anxieties refracted through exaggerated and distorted visions of spectacle, youth and domesticity. But more notable is their interest in the notion of family: a uniquely Greek obsession that stems from the holy trifecta of conservatism – Fatherland, Faith, Family (), the most powerful slogan of the Greek nationalist project. Yet weirdness stretches back way beyond recent, surreally-inclined vessels into the nation’s cultural and political turmoil. Films on varyingly ludic wavelengths reside in the margins of a vast Greek cinematic spectrum, demanding only the desire to chase the dragon of discovery along the unfamiliar paths of a national cinema contoured with images that are both beautiful and strange.
