Focus on Athina Rachel Tsangari

Section programme

The jury would later praise the film “for its delicate, fresh, and intimate mise-en-scène—for its innovative exploration of film language, playfulness, and sensitivity.” Attenberg premiered in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival the previous year, where lead actress Ariane Labed received the Best Actress award. In that competition, however, Attenberg was an eccentric outsider. At New Horizons, it was at home.

“Director Athina Tsangari received the Grand Prix and a €20,000 prize at Helios in Wrocław,” reported Radio RAM. “She was happy that her story of an unusual friendship between two young women had been recognized. Every award is welcome, because Attenberg, like Greece, is drowning in debt.” By then, the economic crisis had become—almost inevitably—the dominant lens through which new Greek cinema was read. A trend defined by Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (which Tsangari produced) and Attenberg was quickly labeled the “Greek Weird Wave” by international critics. These films—marked by their blend of physicality and detachment, emotional intensity and stylistic eccentricity—both reflected and anticipated the unraveling of Greece’s political and economic systems.

But these films also emerged in response to a deeper, longer-standing crisis: the stagnation of cinema itself. Tsangari was part of the FoG (Filmmakers of Greece) collective, which advocated for structural reforms in the Greek film industry—a movement Urszula Lipińska wrote about on the occasion of the eleventh edition of New Horizons. Attenberg and Lanthimos’s early works, co-produced by Tsangari (including his debut Kinetta, 2005, which echoes her fascination with cinematic space), were made possible thanks to efforts by a younger generation to overhaul outdated funding models. In hindsight, it wasn’t enough: following their initial breakthroughs, both Tsangari and Lanthimos would go on to make just one more feature film in Greece each.

Tsangari, unsurprisingly, resists national labels and keeps her distance from the tropes imposed by international critics on the festival circuit—those eager to bundle disparate films into neat categories and extract some overarching truth about a country or a moment in time. Yes, she wrote Attenberg during the Athens protests of December 2008, after the police killing of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the Exarcheia district; yes, she draws inspiration from ancient theatrical traditions; yes, she filmed in the town where she spent her early childhood. But following the thread of her “Greekness” leads us down a false path—because that’s not the whole story.

She spent much of her adult life—and nearly all of her film education—abroad. After earning a philosophy degree at the University of Thessaloniki, she moved to the United States, completing a master’s in performance studies at NYU’s pioneering Tisch School of the Arts. She then crossed the country to study film directing at the University of Texas at Austin. It was the early 1990s: American independent cinema was in the midst of a defining surge, and Austin—buzzing with its own irreverent, creative energy—offered a sharp contrast to the state’s conservative reputation. There, Tsangari met Richard Linklater, appearing in a cameo role in Slacker (1990) and, years later—when both were filmmakers of an entirely different stature—in Before Midnight (2013).

Tsangari’s feature debut, The Slow Business of Going (2000), was made in the most independent way imaginable: shot over five years, after hours, with a rotating crew of friends who returned behind and in front of the camera in various roles. The animated opening credits list ten screenwriters, including Tsangari and lead actress Lizzie Curry Martinez, who also starred in her earlier short Fit (1994). The film is episodic, strung together by a narrative framework: the global travels of Petra Going, a girl with a camera in her eyes—a kind of director, perhaps a cyborg—working as an observer for a cryptic agency (which resembles a mix between a start-up and a squat, in keeping with the zeitgeist). Most of the story unfolds in hotels—though a Greek factory and Lake Travis in Texas also appear—each location serving as the setting for a different genre: gangster noir in Houston, slapstick chase in Prague, musical numbers, costume play, even an animated segment on the history of motoring, featuring Trabants and Renault Twingos (!). Tsangari plays with space, geography, and national identity; most of the footage was shot in Texas hotels, yet cinema—through sets, found footage, and animation—becomes a magical vehicle for circling the globe. The film also reads as a playful take on the autobiographical debut: the girl with the camera in her eyes may well be the director’s own stand-in.

In the 2000s, Tsangari returned to Greece, worked on the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games, and produced Kinetta. But all her most significant projects would continue The Slow Business of Going’s obsession with space—each shaped by a distinct, if very different, location. Just as her debut explored the cinematic possibilities of the hotel room, Attenberg unfolds in a drowsy, post-industrial townscape. Tsangari wrote the script without a specific setting in mind, only later realizing it should take place in Aspro Spitia, the town she left at the age of six. The decision gave the film a nearly iconic visual identity. Located in Boeotia on the Gulf of Corinth, Aspro Spitia is anything but a “typical Greek town.” Built in the 1960s as a planned community for workers at a nearby aluminum plant owned by the French conglomerate Pechiney, it was designed by Konstantinos Doxiadis, the visionary urbanist behind Islamabad’s city plan. In Attenberg, though traces of industrial activity still linger in the rising smoke from factory chimneys, the town feels nearly abandoned—an open-air museum of modernist utopia.

And since each of Tsangari’s major projects seems to negate the previous one, her half-hour Gothic fairy tale The Capsule—inspired by the paintings of Aleksandra Waliszewska, who co-wrote the screenplay—was filmed in an 18th-century mansion on the island of Hydra, known for its impeccably preserved historic architecture. It’s the same island where Mihalis Kakogiannis shot one of Tsangari’s favorite Greek films, A Girl in Black (1956). The villa once belonged to a female shipowner—at a time when women rarely held such roles—and today houses the School of Fine Arts. Which makes it all the more ironic that her third feature, Chevalier, takes place almost entirely aboard a sleek, modern yacht rendered in cool gray tones—a film that gleefully picks apart and preempts the genre of “rich people on a luxury boat” stories before it fully existed. After the “feminine,” even “girlish” energy of Attenberg (“Fuck you, we’re weird!” proclaimed one interview headline in Polish press when the film opened in 2011) and the all-women cast of The Capsule, Chevalier flips the script entirely with an all-male (and emphatically male) ensemble. The screenplay was co-written with Efthymis Filippou, another cult icon (why not?) of the so-called Greek Weird Wave.

The context for Tsangari’s latest feature, Harvest (2024)—which premiered in the main competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival—may lie in her first major UK-based project: the BBC series Trigonometry (2020), set against the backdrop of gentrifying London. Tsangari later cast the magnetic Thalissa Teixeira, one of the series' leads, in Harvest. Based on the novel by Jim Crace and filmed in Scotland’s Argyll region, the film traces the enclosure of land during a time somewhere between the late Middle Ages and the 18th century. Spatial transformation literally drives the narrative: a cartographer (Arinzé Kene) arrives in a rural village to map the land and count its inhabitants. Harvest can be seen as a jab at national pride (or rather, with two versions of it): hailed as a “Greek representative,” Tsangari cheekily steps into a thoroughly British tradition—folk horror—only to show she doesn’t need horror at all. The British already made a canonical film in the 1970s about precisely this collision between pre-modernity and modernity, the pre-industrial landscape and the pagan past—Harvest circles the same territory, but with different tools. (This tradition is carried on today by filmmakers like Mark Jenkin, a favorite in Wrocław.) To the confusion of British critics, Tsangari strips the “horror” out of “folk horror,” deconstructing the convention of assigning folk tales to stories full of metaphysical horror in contemporary cinema.

Drawn by a cartographer from distant lands, the map in Harvest is less a representation than an instrument—its purpose not to depict space, but to convert it into property for the nobility. The theme of colonization has appeared in Tsangari’s work before: in an interview with the feminist film journal Cléo, she described her choice to film Attenberg in her hometown as “a political gesture, not a personal or nostalgic one,” rooted in her interest in the imprint of French capital on the Greek landscape. Both films dismantle the idea that the provinces are zones of slow time or delayed history. On the contrary, it is in rural and small-town spaces that shifts in property relations and economic (r)evolutions unfold most completely—viscerally, irreversibly.

Tsangari’s cinema fuses transnationality with locality. Long a quiet part of this festival’s story, her work embodies the phrase “new horizons” in the most literal sense: it maps landscapes, interrogates geographies, and traces what can be seen through a window—or what a window is made to obscure. It’s time to view her body of work as a whole: a three-decade-long, genre-defying cinematic conversation.

Klara Cykorz

The event is under the honorary patronage and financial support of the Embassy of Greece in Warsaw.