In anticipation of screening at Cannes’ MipTV market, Beta Film, which handles distribution, has provided Variety exclusive access to the international trailer for Greek abduction thriller “Silent Road.”
Written by Melina Tsampani and Petros Kalkovalis and directed by Vardis Marinakis, the series dissects the entangled lives of an affluent family in Athens after a school bus carrying their children is held hostage, the kids and bus drivers inside being abducted and held for ransom. A slight nod to the eerie legend, turning on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the town must come to grips with the event while police dig into the crime, desperate to resolve the atrocity.
“While shaping the idea for ‘Silent Road,’ we wanted to use a fairytale in the narration, as a bridge that connects the world of adults to that of the children. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a dark fairytale about trust and revenge.
Written by Melina Tsampani and Petros Kalkovalis and directed by Vardis Marinakis, the series dissects the entangled lives of an affluent family in Athens after a school bus carrying their children is held hostage, the kids and bus drivers inside being abducted and held for ransom. A slight nod to the eerie legend, turning on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the town must come to grips with the event while police dig into the crime, desperate to resolve the atrocity.
“While shaping the idea for ‘Silent Road,’ we wanted to use a fairytale in the narration, as a bridge that connects the world of adults to that of the children. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a dark fairytale about trust and revenge.
- 4/3/2022
- by Holly Jones
- Variety Film + TV
Dimitris Kanellopoulos makes his directorial debut with “Pack of Sheep,” a portrait of the corrosive effects of violence on the male inhabitants of a small Greek town, which has its world premiere in the main competition of the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
The story unfolds as Thanasis (Dimitris Lalos), a family man struggling to pay his debt to a local loan shark, joins forces with several townsmen to negotiate more favorable terms to settle their accounts. But when two petty criminals arrive in the town, looking to strongarm the men into paying up, they’re soon caught up in a cycle of violence that threatens to spin out of control.
For his first feature, Kanellopoulos said he was urged by a friend to write a noir story that captured the unique, wintery atmosphere of the island where he was raised. He began writing in the darkest period of Greece’s economic crisis,...
The story unfolds as Thanasis (Dimitris Lalos), a family man struggling to pay his debt to a local loan shark, joins forces with several townsmen to negotiate more favorable terms to settle their accounts. But when two petty criminals arrive in the town, looking to strongarm the men into paying up, they’re soon caught up in a cycle of violence that threatens to spin out of control.
For his first feature, Kanellopoulos said he was urged by a friend to write a noir story that captured the unique, wintery atmosphere of the island where he was raised. He began writing in the darkest period of Greece’s economic crisis,...
- 11/5/2021
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
Dating back to her childhood in Greece, first-time director Janis Rafa has spent the better part of her life contemplating death. The title of her feature-length debut, “Kala Azar,” takes its name from the parasitic disease that swept through the country in the 1990s, ravaging the animal population. In Rafa’s childhood home, which included both domesticated animals and strays the family had taken in, her father served as an erstwhile gravedigger, burying pets that had been claimed by the disease, or accidents, or natural causes.
Echoes of that arresting memory resurface years later in “Kala Azar,” which centers on a young couple (played by Pinelopi Tsilika and Dimitris Lalos) living on the outskirts of an unnamed city in the south of Europe, collecting and cremating dead pets and returning the ashes to their owners. The fragile barrier between life and death is ever-present in the film, as is the...
Echoes of that arresting memory resurface years later in “Kala Azar,” which centers on a young couple (played by Pinelopi Tsilika and Dimitris Lalos) living on the outskirts of an unnamed city in the south of Europe, collecting and cremating dead pets and returning the ashes to their owners. The fragile barrier between life and death is ever-present in the film, as is the...
- 11/15/2020
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
It’s been over a decade since Greece’s government-debt crisis first bit down — perhaps the sharpest national crunch to happen in the immediate aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial meltdown. And so, in the way of things, it’s been about a decade since class disparity, economic distress and social inequality have surfaced among the primary themes of Greek cinema’s arthouse output. It makes Michalis Konstantatos’ icily controlled sophomore feature, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” which fits squarely in that tradition, feel both mature and slightly out-of-time: a well-made, deeply embedded report from the exhausted end of the last crisis, while we’re in the teething stages of a whole new one.
Unlocking its secrets only gradually, the film begins with scenes of seemingly ordinary, bourgeois life in an expensive-looking modernist-minimalist home in rural Greece. Aliki (Yota Argyropoulou) goes for a morning run in the forested hills nearby,...
Unlocking its secrets only gradually, the film begins with scenes of seemingly ordinary, bourgeois life in an expensive-looking modernist-minimalist home in rural Greece. Aliki (Yota Argyropoulou) goes for a morning run in the forested hills nearby,...
- 8/19/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Penelope and Dimitris are professional pet cremators. They roam the sprawling periphery of an industrial Greek town, retrieve defunct animals from their owners, burn them, and return their ashes. There’s a sense of urgency to their mission: kala azar, the infectious disease Janis Rafa’s singular debut feature is named after, is decimating hordes of canines all across Southern Europe, and the epidemic is threatening humans, too. But the couple’s pilgrimage also crackles with a certain compassion, an empathy that blurs their distance from the carcasses and complicates their role as undertakers. “You can include some of your pet’s favorite things,” Penelope tells a grieving woman before folding a handkerchief over her dead goldfish, rehearsing new condolences on her way to the next mourner: “We understand this must be a difficult time for you and your family…”
Truth be told, Rafa’s taciturn leads should only be...
Truth be told, Rafa’s taciturn leads should only be...
- 2/2/2020
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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