Marissa Triantafyllidou

Avant-Drag!

Avant-Drag! paints portraits of ten drag artists of varying gender expressions and sexualities who take to the streets of Athens to query, problematise and (yes, please!) undermine social strictures. Employing wildly imagined personas – like riot housewives and Albanian turbo-folk girls – who perform acts as revolutionary as praising abortion and as charming as drawing childish pictures, these artists call for social justice by taking aim at conservatism, patriarchy, patriotism, racism and sexism.

The Last Taxi Driver

Thomas works as a taxi driver by night and he lives with his wife, Maria, and his teenage son, Tassos. When one of his customers commits suicide, Thomas is prompted to confront everything he’s kept buried inside for too long, and realize the shortcomings of his life. When he meets Eleni, his client’s lost daughter, he sees in her a way out of his weary life and becomes romantically obsessed with her.

Music

Abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, Jon is taken in and adopted, without having known his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, a warden in the prison where he is incarcerated after a deadly tragic accident. She seems to seek out his presence, takes care of him, records music for him. Jon’s eyesight begins to fail … From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will gain something in return. Thus, in spite of going blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.

Silence 6–9

Aris and Anna meet one evening in a half-abandoned town surrounded by antennas. In this strange, dreamlike world, the two solitary souls gradually start to develop feelings for one another.

Not Tomorrow

Michalis has barely 24 hours to redefine his life and make up for his close ones. That same night he meets a girl. He only wishes that the morning never comes.

Dodo

A dodo, a bird that disappeared 3000 years ago, makes its appearance in Athens in the luxurious residence of a family on the verge of ruin for which the countdown has begun: the 38 crucial and saving hours that separate them from the marriage of their daughter with a rich heir. The boundaries between reason and madness will be tested and the situation will soon be out of control.

The City and the City

Six chapters describe the lives and perils of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community which was almost entirely exterminated by the Nazis in 1943. Past and present become an echo chamber in which the viewer experiences, aghast, the madness of humanity.

Beauty

Callie, an unemployed young woman living with her controlling mother, is looking for a way out through the glittery yet cruel YouTube beauté universe. She will go beyond her limits to please her handful of subscribers while keeping up a smiling face and maintaining a perfect image.

Monday

A spark on a Friday can lead to a sizzling weekend fling, but what happens when you get to the inevitable Monday?

Birds (Or How to Be One)

Two men go in search of a birdman to become a bird in nine steps.

I Will Cross Tomorrow

The brief but intense encounter of a Greek police officer and a Syrian refugee changes the way the two see this world.

Her Job

A devoted but underappreciated housewife's brief taste of autonomy as a mall cleaner (where she is a popular, model employee) is threatened by pending layoffs.

Suntan

Kostis is a 40-year-old doctor that finds himself in the small island of Antiparos, in order to take over the local clinic. His whole life and routine will turn upside down when he meets an international group of young and beautiful tourists and he falls in love with Anna, a 19-year-old goddess.

Impressions of a Drowned Man

A man who doesn’t know who he is meets his former love. She tells him he is a famous poet, Kostas Karyotakis, who killed himself in 1928. Every year he returns on the anniversary of his death.

Volta

A mother and daughter start out from downtown Athens and head to the northern suburbs of the city. Nina thinks she's going on a walk.

At Home

For many years, Nadja has worked as a housekeeper for an upper class Greek couple and their daughter. She’s allowed to feel like part of the family. When she’s diagnosed with a serious illness, and the man of the house runs into financial difficulties due to the economic crisis, Nadja loses her job. Yet she shows no external sign of how these two traumatic events have affected her.

Xenia

Strangers in their own birthplace, 16-year-old Danny and 18-year-old Odysseus cross the entire country in search of their Greek father, after their Albanian mother passes away.

Properties Of 2

According to the director: “The film deals with the corrosive effect, on a relatively advanced life, of what psychologists may call ‘the repressed’, while I prefer to concentrate on the beautiful Greek word ‘kaemos’ [καημός, translated as longing, unfulfilled desire]. The most ‘realistic’ and most synoptic… synopsis I can give for the fiction of the film is: ‘A man comes face to face with himself’, but this wording (and here comes the fantasy element) must be read literally.”

God Loves Caviar

The true-life, stranger-than-fiction tale of eighteenth-century Greek pirate turned merchant Ioannis Varvakis, who rose from humble beginnings to become the head of one of the largest mercantile empires in Europe.

Casus Belli

All kinds of people are waiting in seven different queues. The first person of each queue becomes the last of the next one, thus creating an enormous human line. But at the end of the line, it all begins backwards again.

Homeland

In a country shaken by major political events, three generations of a Greek family clash over an inside-the-family adoption.

Student Occupation

There comes a day when Yannis, a 12th-grader, is ready to tell Anna, a fellow student, how much he likes her. His plans will turn upside down when, that very day, he'll find the school under student occupation and Anna among the occupying protesters. A half-erased graffiti and a fussy tv-reporter will further complicate the story. "For" or "Against"?

Eden Is West

Desperate to break free from the poverty of his homeland, Elias boards a ramshackle people-smuggling trawler to France. But when the boat is raided by police, Elias leaps into the ocean, eventually finding himself washed up on a Mediterranean beach resort called Eden. So begins Elias odyssesy across Western Europe to Paris, where wondrous promise, helpful new friends and perilous dangers await him every step of the way.

Βank Bang

Two brothers, the honest Michalis and the swindler Nontas, are forced to resort to bank robberies in order to pay off the latter's entanglements with the mafia. Michalis' love for a secret police officer, a strange couple of her colleagues and Nontas' greed will make things even more complicated.

Without

A contemporary married couple and their eight-year-old son are exposed to our observation. The husband, around 35, works as a tax specialist for an import-export firm. His 30-year-old wife looks after their child and their home. The man's impending promotion at work triggers their dreams of social advancement and financial improvement. As their plain everyday life unfolds the characters are denuded to reveal their different needs and desires which render their functioning and communication increasingly hard. The man's inability to meet the escalating demands of his social circle and those of his wife brings tension into their relationship and leads to the culmination of the drama. The unexpected as well as extreme solution given by the heroine leads both the hero and the viewer to redefine reality on the basis of how things look and how they really are.

Valse Sentimentale

Constantina Voulgaris’s first feature film is a delightful anomaly in contemporary cinema, sort of like a Cat Power song. Raw, earnest, melancholy, awkward in parts, razor sharp in others, it's lyrical, yet with an undercutting touch of offbeat humor. And more than anything it's unapologetically a girl's bedroom song, an utterly sincere home movie. Made with the ever-generous currency of a cast and crew of friends, and the ample downtime that Greek summer-in-the-city affords, when everybody else is sunning and hooking up out in the islands, it's a film about two exiles -- in Athens, in summer, in love. A sentimental dance between a girl and a boy who could be stuck in downtown any-ville, yearning to be with each other but too cool to dare, too chicken to admit it, too clumsy not to step on each other's Doc Martens, and too damn sentimental not to surrender, in the end, to that old-fashioned thing called love.

One Day in August

Middle August in Athens. Three families, living in a three storey building, leave for their summer vacations. Everyone is wishing for a miracle to happen this summer. In the meantime, a drifter breaks into their apartments and rummages their personal belongings, thus unfolding hidden secrets.