The last time Athina Rachel Tsangari visited the Midnight Sun Film Festival, in 2011, Greek cinema was making its international breakthrough. Tsangari, the director of the iconoclastic Attenberg and the assistant producer of Dogtooth, was mentioned as one of the harbingers of this new liberation.
Tsangari has an outsider’s perspective to Greek cinema: she left her native country for United States when 19, and did not return until 12 years later. She studied performance art at the University of New York, an experience she says taught her a great deal about observing and performing human behaviour, movement and speech. Tsangari also lived for eight years in Austin, Texas, and appeared as the “Greek cousin” in Richard Linklater’s student and generation film Slacker (Midnight Sun Film Festival 1995). Tsangari’s debut feature film as a director, the “sci-fi road movie” The Slow Business of Going (2000) did not go entirely unnoticed on the festival circuit, but she nevertheless had to wait ten years for the opportunity to make another film – which became her international breakthrough. Attenberg (2010), completed when the financial crisis hit Greece, features some elements that can clearly be considered national idiosyncrasies. The cheerful dance numbers between episodes appear as commentary on the use of the choir in classic Greek theatre, while the relationship between the daughter and the father shows emancipation from “family fascism”, noting the strong role that family still has in Greece.
Since her last visit Tsangari has depicted equally twisted communities of different types in her feature films. Chevalier (2015) is a comedy set on a luxury yacht where six men start to measure their alpha maleness by giving each other points. Tsangari’s latest film Harvest (2024), an adaption of a Jim Crace novel, is set in a rural community some time before industrial revolution.
Timo Malmi