EDINBURGH GREEK FILM FESTIVAL

AT EDINBURGH FILMHOUSE  WWW.FILMHOUSECINEMA.COM

Friday 2 December AT 8.45

Suntan 

Argyris Papadimitropoulos • Greece 2016 •1h 44m

DCP • Greek with English subtitles  • 18

Cast: Makis Papadimitriou, Elli Tringou

A Greek island. The winters are cold, it rains, very few people live there. Summer comes and everybody seems to be there. Kostis, the new doctor, is good with colds and chills in winter but can’t cope with summer or with young women who wear clothes only when they really have to, seem to send out mixed messages and have occasional meaningless sex with amusing older men who do not realize they are older, amusing or meaningless. This is Kostis’s story. You may meet someone like him on your next Greek island. You will probably like him.

Followed by a Q&A with director Argyris Papadimitropoulos.

Saturday 3 December at 8.45

Short Fuse  

Kostas Skiftas, Andreas Lampropoulos  • Greece 2016 • 1h 26m

DCP • Greek with English subtitles • 18

Cast: Apostolis Totsikas, Evgenia Dimitropoulou, Tasos Nousias, Konstantinos Markoulakis, Thodoris Atheridis. 

A young lawyer loses his temper with several people, who lose their tempers with him. He’s given some do-or-die tasks. There are adventures, various cars suffer, many Greek policemen look threateningly baffled, fights are arranged. There is action – lots and lots of it. Could this is the very first Greek action movie ever? There’s a girl, of course, who needs to be rescued. The plot forgets about her for a bit so she has to be rescued again. Will the guy remember who she is? Will they live happily ever after? Will they ever manage to sit down?

Followed by a Q&A with director, co-screenwriter Kostas Skiftas and Producer/co-screenwriter Konstantinos Moutsinas.

Sunday 4 December at 8.45

Cloudy Sunday Ouzeri Tsitsanis

Manousos Manousakis • Greece 2015 • 1h 52m

DCP • Greek with English subtitles • 18

Cast: Andreas Konstantinou, Christina Hilla Fameli, Yannis Stankoglou, Gerasimos Skiadaressis

Salonica, 1942, under German occupation. Vasilis Tsitsanis, the great Rebetika musician, is running an Ouzo joint, a crossroads where collaborators, blackmarketeers, resistance fighters and musicians meet. Salonica’s Jews – about a third of the population - cannot comprehend the evil they face. Through the eyes of a Jewish girl and her Christian lover we watch their tragedy take its course. This is a lament for a city still beautiful but horribly wounded and a monument to Tsitsanis and his masterpiece of implied resistance, the song ‘Cloudy Sunday’.

Monday 5th December at 8.45

A Family Affair Mia Oikogeneiaki Ypothesi

Angeliki Aristomenopolou • Greece • 2015 • 1h 27m

DCP • English and Greek with English subtitles • 15

Cast: Andonis Xylouris (Psarandonis), Yorgos Xylouris (Psarogiorgis), Apollonia Xylouris.

The Xylouris family are a bunch of crazy Cretan musicians. Of course we are all crazy, but Cretans are crazy in their very own way. Nikos was maybe the voice that destroyed the Colonels artistically. This is about his remaining family - Yorgos, who talks, teaches and explains; and Andonis, who hardly talks at all but plays stubborn Cretan, unreformed, uncompromising music and hypnotises audiences as he travels the festival circuit. This is an intimate portrait of a very old, living tradition. Dancing may be inevitable, but only on Lothian Road.

Tuesday 6 December at 8.45

Chevalier 

Athina Rachel Tsangari • Greece 2015 • 1h 45m

DCP • Greek with English subtitles • 18

Cast: Makis Papadimitriou, Sakis Rouvas, Vangelis Mourikis, Nikos Orphanos, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Panos Koronis.

Tsangari (Attenberg) turns her steely eye on Men - six of them on a boat with nothing better to do than try to work out who is the best. What ‘best’ means turns out to be uncertain when applied to men, so more or less everything they can think of is tested. Measurements are taken, IKEA units competitively assembled – the dafter it is the more competitive it gets. The men reveal themselves to themselves and leave us with all the usual questions about humanity and masculinity but fashioned into something new and tantalising. Tsangari has added something very human to her usual philosophical concerns.

Wednesday 7 December at 8.45

OXI: An Act of Resistance

Ken McMullan • UK/Greece • 1h40m

DCP • English, French and Greek with English subtitles • 15

Cast: John Shrapnel, Dominique Pinon, Hélène Cixous, Étienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, Julia Faure, Alexis Georgopoulou, Eleni Kallia.

A meditation on Greekness, what it is, how it behaves, the persistence of Ancient Greece in Modern Greeks, the magnificent history of Greek resistance, how Sophocles’s Antigone might resist now, how the laughter of Aristophanes might dissolve the absurdities of Austerity, how Cavafy’s poems speak of the ancient but enlighten the modern. OXI (the Greek for ‘No’) dramatizes and documents the crisis we all live in and which we all must understand and solve and helps us both to understand Greece and to ask questions of ourselves.

Followed by a Q&A with Ken McMullan and producer Martin McQuillan.

EXHIBITION: IMAGINE THE SOUNDS

SYN presents, in the framework of this year’s Edinburgh Greek Film Festival, the group exhibition Imagine the Sounds. The exhibition takes as its starting point the relationship between moving image and sound, which has been portrayed in cinema since its very first incarnation. Beginning from the festival’s films, the exhibition examines sound, and ultimately music, as a code of communication. It performs a role as an element which both leads and complements the "story” and also as an expression of cultural, political and social life. http://www.synfestivaledinburgh.co.uk/