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The Chloe Sevigny-starring adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s classic novel Bonjour Tristesse from director Durga Chew-Bose is set to open the 2024 Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery program with a world premiere, organizers said Wednesday.

Claes Bang, Lily McInerny and French actress Nailia Harzoune also star in the English-language contemporary take by the Canadian writer-turned-director. TIFF’s Discovery program, which focuses on first-time and up-and-coming international directors, is also giving world premieres to Reservation Dogs and Letterkenny star Kaniehtiio Horn’s debut feature and comedy Seeds.

There’s also world premieres for Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way, Egil Pedersen’s My Fathers’ Daughter, Laura Carreira’s On Falling, Pavlo Ostrikov’s U Are The Universe and K’Naan Warsame’s Mother, Mother, co-produced by Alex Kurtzman.

Toronto’s Discovery sidebar over the years has screened debut films for Oscar winners like Sólo Con Tu Pareja, the first feature by Alfonso Cuarón...

For nearly two decades, director Yorgos Lanthimos has enlisted the skills of Greek film editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis. The two first teamed up for commercials and continued with Lanthimos' 2005 drama, Kinetta, setting them on a path that would earn Mavropsaridis Oscar nominations for both The Favourite and Poor Things. They share a filmmaking language, which came in handy when whittling the auteur's most recent feature, Kinds of Kindness, in the edit. The anthology film, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, required their well-established finesse to adapt it for its theatrical release, especially considering certain scenes could be considered "too extreme."...

Fans of Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos know that there's a lot to love about his dark, bizarre films, but it can be very difficult to recommend them to people. Social rules are often thrown out the window and what we think of as standard human behavior is often turned on its head, which make his films uncomfortable even before digging into some of the tougher subject matter. For those who are willing to view the world through Lanthimos' slightly tilted (and fish-eyed) lens, however, these films are beautiful explorations of the human condition. But which is the best? If someone were going to dip their toe into his work, or only had the time and energy to watch one film, which film should they pick? 

Fear not, intrepid film fan, because I'm here with the definitive /Film ranking of all of Lanthimos' feature films -- from his earliest Greek-language efforts to his latest,...

Searchlight Pictures has revealed the official teaser trailer for Kinds of Kindness, the upcoming movie from Poor Things and The Favourite filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.

Opening in theaters on June 21, 2024, the film was written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou.

Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife, who was missing at sea, has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

The film stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer.

The producers include Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element, Kasia Malipan, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Originally titled “And,” the movie started production in October of 2022 in New Orleans and...

Variety will honor “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos with the Creative Impact in Directing Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The award, which is for the director’s body of work including “The Favourite”, “The Lobster” and “The Killing of A Sacred Deer,” will be presented as part of Variety’s annual 10 Directors to Watch and Creative Impact Awards brunch presented by Directv on Jan. 5 at the Parker Palm Springs. “Poor Things” star and frequent collaborator with Yorgos, Emma Stone, will be on hand to present him the award at the brunch.

“Poor Things” debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion. The Searchlight Pictures film has continued to wow audiences after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. It won the Bronze Frog for cinematographer Robbie Ryan and the Audience Award at CamerImage, as well as...

A "bizarre dance sequence" could be a square in a game of Yorgos Lanthimos-themed Bingo. When I watched "Poor Things" (screenplay by Tony McNamara) at the New York Film Festival, the film's contender for Greatest Guffaws occurred when the free-spirited Bella Beatrix (Emma Stone), a Frankensteinesque reanimated woman, bounces onto the ballroom floor with abandon. Her rakish paramour Duncan Wedderburn (a hilarious Mark Ruffalo) joins in and marvels at her untamable spirit, though she would end up burning out his patience later. Living in a steampunk Victorian setting of futurism and antiquity, Bella's dance is her proverbial middle finger to restrictive "polite society."

Weird dancing — or odd choreography — is a vital ingredient to Lanthimos' directorial idiosyncrasies, given that dance is an extension of power, control, or conformity. His early 2005 "Kinetta" engages in a litany of sloppy homicide reenactments, and several of his films followed up with his signature "weird dances.

“Sex is back,” Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, told a packed house of festivalgoers as they took in the newest effort from Yorgos Lanthimos at the 50th anniversary edition. A pre-screening convo and tribute was moderated by director Karyn Kusama, as the two discussed Lanthimos’ filmography, including his early works “Kinetta” and “Alps.”

In the audience were Oscar winners like director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and actor Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”), and they, along with the rest of the crowd, devoured the audacious, Frankenstein-esque tale.

After bowing at the Venice Film Festival, Lanthimos brought his eccentric cinematic style to the Colorado mountains with the sci-fi dramedy, the first movie among this year’s sensational Telluride lineup that feels like a potential best picture winner.

Based on the novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, it tells the story of a young woman named Bella Baxter...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ career has long displayed a morbid fascination for the contours of the body, mind, and spirit, in all their ugliness. Well before “Dogtooth” shook the international film scene and “The Favourite” won Olivia Colman an Oscar, the Greek filmmaker made his debut with “Kinetta.” While this head-scratching puzzle box may at times feel like a sketchpad draft for his films to come, it nevertheless exerts a hypnotic power that makes it easy to see why Lanthimos quickly became a director to watch.

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Most of Lanthimos’ movies include self-flagellation of some sort, whether the literal acts of torture inflicted by the women of “The Favourite” on themselves,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of Modern Art

MoMA has reopened, and it is–I do not say this lightly–almost too much in one weekend. See for yourself.

Film Forum

“Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo” begins with both canon and lesser-known Japanese cinema.

Films by Tim Burton and Joseph Losey play this weekend.

Metrograph

Films by Hitchcock and Blake Edwards play this weekend.

For all of his seemingly out-there ideas and distinctive obsessions, Oscar-nominated Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is one of world cinema’s most consistent creators. Even in his earliest solo feature, the hard-to-find “Kinetta,” Lanthimos’ unique aesthetic and worldview takes center stage. In the 2005 feature, bound for a U.S. release after all these years, Lanthimos’ panache for building out disturbing self-contained worlds that are bound by their own wild logic and weirdo rules is clear.

Though the film screened at various festivals in 2005 and 2006, it was never released stateside. Thanks to New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, the film will finally be available to American audiences, care of an upcoming run at the Queens institution. The film stars Aris Servetalis, Evangelia Randou, and Costas Xikominos.

Per the film’s official synopsis: “In a desolate Greek resort town, three tenuously connected people are motivated by mysterious impulses. A plain-clothes...

Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis describes “The Favourite” as “more accessible” than the previous films he’s made with Yorgos Lanthimos. But at the same time there are still “dark undertones, because these are the themes [Lanthimos] is interested in. So the concern in the editing was to make that transition” from comedy to discomfort with relative ease. Watch our exclusive video interview with Mavropsaridis above.

See Tony McNamara Interview: ‘The Favourite’

This Fox Searchlight release finds a frail Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) occupying the throne while her loyal advisor, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), handles the day-to-day governance. But when Sarah’s cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), becomes a palace servant, the two spar for the monarch’s attentions. “The Favourite” earned 10 Oscar bids, including one for Mavropsaridis; it’s tied with “Roma” as the nominations leader.

Mavropsaridis is no stranger to Lanthimos’s bizarre style, having previously cut the director’s similarly strange...

He went to film school in Greece, expecting a career making commercials. Now, he’s made an award-winning period drama starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone

Thirteen years ago, Yorgos Lanthimos made a micro-budget film called Kinetta. Filmed in the shakiest hand-held style, it featured three actors mooching around hotels and hospitals in a rundown Greek coastal town, sometimes enacting fight scenes that resembled avant-garde choreography rehearsals. There was barely any dialogue, except when one character barked detailed directions at the others. Oh, and there was the occasional go-karting sequence. Even for those of us who like our art films bleakly inscrutable, Kinetta was a tall order.

Back then, you might have concluded that Lanthimos was the director Least Likely To. Least likely to be a magnet for actors of the starry calibre of Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz. Least likely to be one of...

After Yorgos Lanthimos scored an Oscar nomination for “Dogtooth,” his jarring suburban thriller about a family that keeps its children cut off from the outside world, he made the rounds in Los Angeles. Nothing stuck. “I was going around, meeting all these people, being stressed out going from one studio to another,” the Greek filmmaker said. “You don’t really know if they appreciate your work, or if they just want to meet you because your film is hot now.”

It took a couple of years, but Lanthimos ultimately figured out a better solution for bringing his oddball visions to a wider audience: He left impoverished Greece and settled into the robust artistic community of London, developing commercially viable English-language projects while requiring that A-list actors approach him on his own terms. That’s the secret ingredient that has allowed Lanthimos, nearly a decade after “Dogtooth,” to make his biggest...

“Are you going to rape me or seduce me?” “I am gentleman.” “Rape then.” With clear-cut, witty dialogues such as this one—performed by the fantastic cast in a shrewd, straight-forward and incredibly speedy way—Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest, The Favourite, for many a viewer was their favorite of this year’s Venice competition, on both sides: the Lanthimos-fans as well as -sceptics. This was not surprising, given the film’s high entertainment impact as well as its major momentum. In the end, it got the Grand Jury Prize, but would certainly have deserved a Golden Lion, because this period drama set in the early 18th century is equally splendid in its precise visual composition and breathless editing as it is in the handling of an unsurpassable rhetorical verve. A queer Queen Anne is the main (sulkily ailing) protagonist, with rivaling duo (cousins) of Sarah Churchill (a.k.a. Lady Marlborough...

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos is no stranger to the Toronto Film Festival: Ever since his solo debut Kinetta (2005) appeared in the 2005 Discovery programme, he's returned regularly with ever more intriguing movies and always more eclectic casts. This year's entry, the tense, dramatically escalating domestic drama The Killing of a Sacred Deer—loosely based on the myth of Iphigenia, whose fate is best Googled after the credits roll—pairs Colin Farrell with Nicole Kidman…...

The most reflexive knock against the mordantly debased films of Yorgos Lanthimos is that they don’t seem to make any sense. If that criticism holds any water, it’s only because sense is the very thing that all of Lanthimos’ characters are trying to make for themselves — his movies can’t afford to manufacture it for them.

That has always been the case for the singular Greek auteur, whose body of work is distinguished by a hilariously masochistic flair for deadpan debauchery, but whose stories are more fundamentally bound by their shared obsession with striking a harmony of some kind between logic and emotion. Not even “Star Trek” is so preoccupied with finding that equilibrium.

In “Dogtooth,” an overprotective couple keep their adult children in a fenced-off compound, inventing a complicated mythos of symbols and signs so that their kids don’t question the fairy tale that holds them hostage.

This is the latest installment of a series exploring significant films from the careers of directors showing new work at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Yorgos Lanthimos would never admit to being at the forefront of a movement, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming synonymous with the so-called Greek Weird Wave. He’s also transcended it: As with “The Lobster” before it, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” was shot in English, features a considerably more high-profile cast than his first three films and wasn’t made in Greece.

Set to premiere on the Croisette this month, his latest also carries a less oddball premise than we’ve come to expect of Lanthimos: Colin Farrell plays a surgeon whose life begins to unravel after he takes a teenage boy under his wing. (Compare that to “The Lobster,” which centers around a hotel whose residents have 45 days to fall in...

Coming out of the Cannes Film Festival, one of our favorites was Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Kubrickian, uproarious drama The Lobster. Toplined by Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly, it follows the peculiarly fascinating story in which singledom is banned and people are forced to find a match within 45 days or they turned into the animal of their choice. Once set to be released by Alchemy, financial troubles have caused them to give it up to A24, and the film was pulled just a few weeks prior to its March 11th release. The distributor has now settled on a new release date of May 13th, confirming to EW, as well as debuting a new trailer.

We said in our review, “In this first half, The Lobster closely resembles Dogtooth and Lanthimos again exhibits his aptitude for creating insular, ruthlessly regimented microcosms through which to unleash his scathing satire.

Coming out of the Cannes Film Festival, one of our favorites was Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Kubrickian, uproarious drama The Lobster. Toplined by Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly, it follows the peculiarly fascinating story in which singledom is banned and people are forced to find a match within 45 days or they turned into the animal of their choice. Finally set to arriving in the U.S. next month, we have the first domestic trailer.

We said in our review, “In this first half, The Lobster closely resembles Dogtooth and Lanthimos again exhibits his aptitude for creating insular, ruthlessly regimented microcosms through which to unleash his scathing satire. Unlike that of its predecessor, however, the attributes of this warped world are immediately familiar, even relatable. As a result, the director’s trademark deadpan humor is no longer simply droll, but uproarious – and also inescapably implicating. Lanthimos and his Dp,...

Reemerging after its Cannes Film Festival premiere — where we named it one of our favorites — Yorgos Lanthimos‘ English-language debut The Lobster has stopped by Tiff, Nyff, and more in the past few weeks. While Alchemy still has yet to set a U.S. release date (only word that it’ll arrive next spring), thanks to various international releases we have more previews from the film following the trailer.

Toplined by Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly, it follows the peculiarly fascinating story in which singledom is banned and people are forced to find a match within 45 days or they turned into the animal of their choice. Today brings a new featurette in which the filmmakers and cast discuss the making of the project, a “music video,” which highlights a great deal of new photos, as well as some fresh stills. Also, if you’d like to...

Human identity is never a concrete absolute in the deeply strange cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos. Rather, identity is something to be emulated, bent out of proportion, twisted and finally, perverted beyond all reason. All four of Lanthimos’ distinctive and hilarious films – that would be his debut “Kinetta,” the troubling “Dogtooth,” “Alps” and this year’s Cannes favorite “The Lobster” – are fundamentally about the flimsiness of forging your own sense of self, and the often-surreal pitfalls that come with such a pursuit. He’s one of the more psychologically adroit directors making movies today, and in a new video essay title from Fandor, narrator Conor Bateman attempts to dig into the knotty mess of contradictions and the deep well of nuttiness that makes up Lanthimos’s work. Role-playing is something that figures into Lanthimos’ films fairly rather heavily. Whether it’s the cadre of actors tasked with impersonating other people’s...

In Cannes the pervasive mood of buzz and business really begs for comedy, and Yorgos Lanthimos's English-language debut The Lobster, so far the best film in the competition, was a much-needed intervention of the absurd at the festival. This came additionally as a surprise to me because I've never been a fan of the Greek director of Dogtooth and Alps, preferring instead the work by his producer, Athina Rachel Tsangari, who made Attenburg. But in a festival whose thread of a theme this year of the intrinsic human difficulty of romantic relationships (In the Shadow of Women, My Golden Days, Carol), The Lobster wonderfully refracts these concerns of grave emotional drama into a precise, gimmick-bound dark comedy. Surprisingly touching, it takes adult worries over loneliness, solitude and coupledom and sends them into a perverse alternate world where single people are punished for their social status by being sent to...

Its much to early to crown him as the godfather of the Greek new wave, but there’ll be mounds of further essays written on the tsunami-breaking splash he made back in 2009 with the unsettling, and yet darkly sidesplitting Dogtooth. as he incrementally adds to his filmography. Winning top honors in the Un Certain Regard section, Yorgos Lanthimos who got his start with the co-directed My Best Friend in 2001 and Kinetta in 2005 officially find himself in the bigger ring and the red carpet steps at the Grand Théâtre Lumière this evening. Unlike…say six years ago, patrons have a firm idea about his idiosyncratic style (and taste as a producer) but with The Lobster are still in the know about not being in the know.

Featuring familiar Alps players in Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia and in co-writer Efthymis Filippou (he and Lanthimos have now co-signed three features in a row...

Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose first three films Kinetta, Oscar-nominee Dogtooth and Alps have raised a cult following around the world, makes a practically effortless transition to the big leagues with his latest, the hilarious and haunting surreal parable The Lobster. A near-future-set tale about a world where citizens must choose a mate or be turned into animals, this marks Lanthimos’ first film in English, his first with major international stars and his first Cannes-competition contender. The stakes are high, but the director and key collaborators raise their game and the movie is boosted by the

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★★★☆☆ The search for meaning can be a futile task in a world obsessed with imagined realities; especially when the line between fact and fiction is distorted and ill-defined. The innate quest for purpose is the core of Yorgos Lanthimos's surreal debut Kinetta (2005), where detachment from modern life is essential in order to unravel the enigmas of human behaviour. Set in a faded holiday resort populated by migrant workers, it contravenes the rules of the medium, approaching its mysteries from an innovative, often infuriatingly obscure perspective. The audience are forced to re-evaluate the world that exists outside the frame and immerse themselves in this comically absurd form of social commentary.

Once again, Latin America is making a show, though this time Argentina trumps Chile with Zama by Lucrecia Martel ♀ (Argentina/Spain).

The 30th CineMart, co-production market of International Film Festival Rotterdam concluded in Rotterdam, with the announcement of the three awards for best CineMart Projects 2013.

Jätten (The Giant) by Johannes Nyholm (Denmark/Sweden) wins the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award; the Arte International Prize goes to The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/UK/Greece) and the WorldView New Genres Fund Development Award goes to Zama by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina/Spain).

The Jury for the CineMart Awards consisted of Olivier Père (Arte France Cinéma), Petri Kemppinen (Finnish Film Foundation / Eurimages representative), Annamaria Lodato (Arte France), Himesh Kar (WorldView) and Amy Richardson (Worldview).

The winners and the Jury statements are:

Eurimages Co-Production Development Award

The Eurimages Co-Production Development Award (30,000 Euro) for the Best CineMart 2013 Project with a European partner is given to Jätten (The Giant) by Johannes Nyholm, a co-production of BeoFilm Productions (Denmark) and Garagefilm International (Sweden).

‘A project of a talented filmmaker who is about to make a leap from widely appreciated short films to his first fiction that will a tender melodrama.’

Johannes Nyholm (1974, Sweden) is an artist and film director based in Gothenburg. The animated film series The Tale of Little Puppetboy (2006) was originally shown at, and made for, gallery screenings. But it has also been shown widely at festivals around the world. The music video Twice, for Little Dragon, was the origin for the short film Dreams from the Woods (2009), which premiered in Cannes. Even before being completed, his latest short, Las Palmas (2011), gained a global reputation through a trailer more successful than any Hollywood blockbuster. The Giant will be Nyholm’s first feature film.

Arte International Prize

The Arte International Prize (7,000 Euro) for the Best CineMart 2013 Project is given to The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos, a production of Element Pictures (Ireland/United Kingdom/Greece).

‘A very exciting and original project from one of the most talented emerging filmmakers of the last decade.’

Yorgos Lanthimos (1973, Greece) filmed a series of videos for dance theatre companies throughout the 1990's. Since 1995, he has directed a number of TV commercials, in addition to music videos, short films and stage plays. His first feature film, Kinetta (2005), screened to critical acclaim at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. His second feature, Dogtooth (2009), won the Un Certain Regard award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Alps (2011), his latest film, premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Osella Award for best screenplay.

WorldView New Genres Fund Development Award

The WorldView New Genres Fund Development Award (5,000 Euro) for the Best CineMart 2013 Project is given to Zama by Lucrecia Martel, a co-production of Lita Stantic Producciones (Argentina) and El Deseo (Spain).

‘A visually stunning and uniquely approached period project by one of South America’s most influential director.’

Lucrecia Martel (1966, Argentina) made several short films, a children's television programme and documentaries. Her first full-length film, La ciénaga(2001), won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 2001 Berlinale; La niña santa (2004), her second feature, was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Martel’s latest feature is La mujer sin cabeza (2008), which premiered in Competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. All Martel’s features have been selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

CineMart was the first platform of its kind to offer filmmakers the opportunity to launch their ideas to the international film industry and to find the right connections to get their projects additionally financed. CineMart also heralds an important start of the 'film year'.

Every year, the CineMart invites a select number of directors/producers to present their film projects to co-producers, funds, sales agents, distributors, TV stations and other potential financiers.

For its 30th edition, CineMart selected thirty-four projects. The selection included four ‘Art:Film’ projects and four projects from this year’s Boost! program.

CineMart is supported by:

Media Programme of the European Union

Rotterdam Development Corporation (Dso)

Netherlands Film Fund

Media Mundus

Arte France Cinéma

Eurimages...

Athens resembles a necropolis in the latest film from the talented Yorgos Lanthimos – and now he has upped sticks for London. It's not abandonment, he insists

Yorgos Lanthimos sits at the table outside a pub, bundled up in jacket and fleece, his breath visible in the autumn air. While he talks, I can't decide what's more telling: the fact that Lanthimos, the most talented Greek director of his generation, has just made a film about dead people; or the fact that he's now quit Greece to live in Britain instead.

Maybe he grew weary of his role as a coal-miner's canary. For now, more than ever, it's tempting to view Lanthimos's gloriously grotesque, off-kilter pictures as an ongoing autopsy of contemporary Greece – a portrait of a nation on the cusp of collapse. His 2005 debut, Kinetta, was an acid drama about the thrill of homicide; 2009's Oscar-nominated Dogtooth was a nail-bitingly...

“When the end is here the Alps are near.” Concluding my trio of interviews with the folks from Alps, we have acclaimed co-writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos who came off back-to-back prestige wins for Dogtooth (winner at Cannes Un Certain Regard section) and a Best Screenplay win in Venice. No stranger to Tiff (as he debuted his first solo effort with Kinetta) the Greek helmer treats us to a film about being in character, remaining in character and losing yourself to a character. In my audio sit-down with the helmer, we discussed his accidental involvement in theater work, his various aesthetic choices, the creation of his band of characters and his the difficulty of putting together a film when funding isn’t exactly in place.

The following is a reprint of our review from 2011.

Thanks to the hard-working welcoming committee of Athina Rachel Tsangari's "Attenberg," we are at first introduced to a white wall, where cracks and stains abound. Two young women, Marina (Ariane Labed) and Bella (Evangelina Randou, "Kinetta") dip into the frame, briefly conversing before launching into an unattractive and aggressive tongue union. They detach, with Bella asking if Marina would like to continue her lesson -- but the student claims to no longer have any "spit left." Smelling bullshit from a mile away, Bella teases her but is unsuccessful in her attempt to persuade her friend to resume education. Instead, they get on all fours and act like animals, swiping at one another before finally walking out of the shot. We're left, again, with that bland wall, only now the camera has pulled out a bit further to reveal some small windows and not-particularly-healthy grass.

#2. Alps Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Cast: Aggeliki Papoulia, Aris Servetalis, Ariane Labed, Johnny Vekris Distributor: Rights Available Buzz: Lanthimos' Un Certain Regard winning Dogtooth has charted a course towards the stars (I vividly remember the viewing experience back in Cannes) and there are bandwagon filled with cinephiles who are very much looking forward to seconds. Primed for a big showing in Venice, Alps is the Greek helmers' third film and is closer in DNA to his first 2005's Kinetta. The Gist: Crawling over the internets for about two weeks now, The 15 Rules Of The Alps gives us insight in character development during the screenwriting process. Think Mission Impossible from a very surreal, human perspective. Tiff Schedule: Tuesday September 13 Isabel Bader Theatre 7:30pmWednesday September 14 Tiff Bell Lightbox 2 3:00pm  ...

Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece's economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?

It must be the worst kiss in screen history. Two young women face each other in front of a white wall. They crane their necks, lock lips and awkwardly flex their jaws. There's no hint of passion. They look more like two birds trying to feed each other. After an excruciating minute of this, they pause. One of them says she feels like throwing up. They clumsily rub their tongues together a little more, only to end up spitting at each other, then blowing raspberries, before hissing at each other like cats.

Attenberg, by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, doesn't get much more normal from there on in. Its heroine, Marina, is a 23-year-old outsider who's largely disgusted by the idea of human contact.

"Attenberg" was screened as part of Sound Unseen International Duluth Film And Music Festival. Thanks to the hard-working welcoming committee of Athina Rachel Tsangari's "Attenberg," we are at first introduced to a white wall, where cracks and stains abound. Two young women, Marina (Ariane Labed) and Bella (Evangelina Randou, "Kinetta") dip into the frame, briefly conversing before launching into an unattractive and aggressive tongue union. They detach, with Bella asking if Marina would like to continue her lesson--but the student claims to no longer have any "spit left." Smelling bullshit from a mile away, Bella teases her but is unsuccessful…...

Greece's Attenberg might be part of the lesser known titles among the twenty-two hopefuls for the 67th Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion, but for those keeping a watchful eye on national cinema trends, already know about about the film's author in filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari and the film's producer in Giorgos Lanthimos' (filmmaker behind Dogtooth) contributions to a new brand of destabilizing Greek cinema. We've got your first look at Tsangari's new film, still, a behind the scenes shot and full synopsis below. Marina, 23, is growing up with her architect father in a prototype factory town by the sea. Finding the human species strange and repellent, she keeps her distance. Instead she stubbornly observes it through the songs of Suicide, the mammal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough, and the sex-ed lessons she receives from her only friend, Bella. A stranger comes to town and challenges her to a foosball duel,...

You might be surprised to learn that, one of the producers on Yorgos Lanthimos' sophomore, Un Certain Regard-winning feature, was a Nyu grad and part of the emerging indie scene in Austin. While obtaining her Mfa in film production at the University of Texas, Greek born Athina Rachel Tsangari was a full fledged Austinite who co-founded and was the artistic director of the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival (programming the early shorts from the likes of Weerasethakul, Reichardt, Maddin, Miranda July, Don Hertzfeld) and get this, her first introduction to feature film was a small role in Richard Linklater's seminal film, Slacker. Prior to wearing the producer's hat on Lanthimos' debut film Kinetta and being the associate producer on Dogtooth, she directed first feature film in 2000's The Slow Business of Going (voted amongst the year’s best “first” features by the Village Voice Critics Poll in 2002) which evolved from her thesis film Fit,...