Thirty or so minutes into Angela Schanelec’s Music, a character makes a startling discovery. We’re inside a prison on the outskirts of an unidentified Greek town, where Jon (Aliocha Schneider) is to spend a manslaughter sentence. And we’re watching him bathed in the cell’s cold light when he suddenly opens his mouth and starts to sing. It’s a moment that shatters the film, one of the loudest in a tale otherwise marked by wistful silences. Jon’s stuck a grocery list of classical composers to the wall, and he intones an aria from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino, “Vedrò con mio diletto.” It’s the first time we hear him sing and it amounts to an otherworldly revelation, both for the young man crooning and those of us who listen: a human being waking up to a superpower.
There’s a tendency to write off Schanelec’s cinema in medical terms.
There’s a tendency to write off Schanelec’s cinema in medical terms.
- 3/6/2023
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about “Music,” the latest beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact from uncompromising formalist Angela Schanelec, feels like a similarly doomed proposition. The limitations of language are seldom as apparent as when grappling with the silvery elisions and crisp, cryptic omissions of this glancing take on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Schanelec is unlikely to vastly expand her fanbase here, but the tiny, fervent following she has accrued over the course of now 10 fantastically intricate features may be more than ever entranced by the fertile illogic of “Music,” a postmodern expression of a premodern text.
Quite what a viewer who doesn’t go in knowing that Schanelec is interpreting Sophocles would make of this film is impossible to imagine. And it’s not like the writer-director-editor is going to make her inspiration explicit. Indeed, the Greek myth most recalled by...
Quite what a viewer who doesn’t go in knowing that Schanelec is interpreting Sophocles would make of this film is impossible to imagine. And it’s not like the writer-director-editor is going to make her inspiration explicit. Indeed, the Greek myth most recalled by...
- 2/21/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Following a trailer for our most-anticipated Berlinale premiere, Christian Petzold’s Afire, another title we’re greatly looking forward to is Angela Schanelec’s Music. With I Was at Home, But and The Dreamed Path, the German director has carved out an enigmatic body of work full of moments of surprising resonance. Starring Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Argyris Xafis, and Frida Tarana, the trailer for her latest film has now arrived.
The director tells Variety, “There are questions in my life, and thus also in my films, to which I have no answers. They relate to family and family relationships as well as to fate, or mere chance, that determines us and to which we must bow. The myth of Oedipus encompasses all of this, including the pain of it all.”
“The myth of Oedipus is the core of this masterful piece of elliptical storytelling in which every detail,...
The director tells Variety, “There are questions in my life, and thus also in my films, to which I have no answers. They relate to family and family relationships as well as to fate, or mere chance, that determines us and to which we must bow. The myth of Oedipus encompasses all of this, including the pain of it all.”
“The myth of Oedipus is the core of this masterful piece of elliptical storytelling in which every detail,...
- 2/15/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
“The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea” takes place far from the eponymous body of water, and in its actual swampy locale — a glum eel-fishing community in western Greece — miracles are in distinctly short supply. But the title’s metaphorical implications of disorientation and immurement are felt in a stylish, many-stranded mystery that often casts viewers adrift in clashing tides of dark genre convention, nightmarish surrealism and fevered close-up character study. Greek writer-director Syllas Tzoumerkas’ third feature unreels and obscurely entangles the stories of two unconnected women, a dissolute female police chief and an abused eel-factory worker, in murky depths of small-town sin. The fishy stew that results maintains the antic, scratchy energy of Tzoumerkas’s striking 2014 festival favorite “A Blast,” though overplotting muddles its impact.
“Sargasso Sea” is assured further festival play following its premiere in Berlin’s Panorama strand, though it’s a challenging sales prospect: Its commercial fortunes...
“Sargasso Sea” is assured further festival play following its premiere in Berlin’s Panorama strand, though it’s a challenging sales prospect: Its commercial fortunes...
- 2/28/2019
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea
Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas is finally getting ready to unveil his third feature, The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea in 2019, reuniting with his A Blast actress Aggeliki Papoulia (we interviewed the Lanthimos regular back in 2012 for Alps) and co-writer Youla Boudali for this revenge thriller. The Greek-German-Swedish co-production is produced by his regular collaborator Maria Drandaki of Homemade Films and co-produced by Ellen Havenith of Prpl, Titus Kreyenberg of unafilm and Olle Wirenhed of Dragon Films. Papoulia and Boudali’s co-stars include Christos Passalis, Maria Filini, Argyris Xafis, Thanassis Dovris and Laertis Malkotsis.…...
Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas is finally getting ready to unveil his third feature, The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea in 2019, reuniting with his A Blast actress Aggeliki Papoulia (we interviewed the Lanthimos regular back in 2012 for Alps) and co-writer Youla Boudali for this revenge thriller. The Greek-German-Swedish co-production is produced by his regular collaborator Maria Drandaki of Homemade Films and co-produced by Ellen Havenith of Prpl, Titus Kreyenberg of unafilm and Olle Wirenhed of Dragon Films. Papoulia and Boudali’s co-stars include Christos Passalis, Maria Filini, Argyris Xafis, Thanassis Dovris and Laertis Malkotsis.…...
- 1/3/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
The 2nd Annual Awards Ceremony of the Hellenic Film Academy was held in Athens yesterday, and the big winner was the Cypriot director Yannis Economides with his third feature film, "Macherovgaltis" (Knifer). Knifer competed against the Venice Film Festival winners and favorites, Attenberg and Hora Proelefsis (Homeland) and still managed to win seven awards out of the nine that has been nominated including Best Feature, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Economides’ black and white drama is about Nikos, an ordinary guy, who after his father’s sudden death decides to go live and work with his uncle in the suburbs of Athens. Nikos also accepts his uncle’s offer which consists of protecting two purebred dogs from the hostile neighbors. Knifer also won the awards for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound and Best Film Editing. Syllas Tzoumerkas’ Hora Proelefsis (Homeland) was originally the Academy’s favorite film with 12 nominations,...
- 5/5/2011
- IONCINEMA.com
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