The best Thanos Grammenos’s movies

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou) plots revenge on her mother (Aliki Georgouli) for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis), a young anti-fascist rebel.

"A," a Greek filmmaker living in exile in the United States, returns to his native Ptolemas to attend a special screening of one of his extremely controversial films. But A's real interest lies elsewhere--the mythical reels of the very first film shot by the Manakia brothers, who, at the dawn of the age of cinema, tirelessly criss-crossed the Balkans and, without regard for national and ethnic strife, recorded the region's history and customs. Did these primitive, never-developed images really exist?

Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers, usually dispensed by action heroes with a well-stocked arsenal. But in Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Manolis Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the (imagined) expectations of others. (Source: LFF programme)

Based on some historical events, the film gives a romanticized biography of Theodoros Kolokotronis, a Greek historical hero serving as a metaphor for Greece herself.

Years ago, Grigoris was forced to sell four velvet armchairs to the junk dealer. After the death of his aunt, he was informed that her entire legacy, which was a box of jewelry, was hidden in one of those four armchairs. In the meantime, the armchairs had been sold to other people, and so a desperate quest for the right armchair begins, resulting in many and sometimes grotesque adventures.

The year is 1965. Natasa Arseni visits Dachau, the place where she was found by the Americans at the end of the World War II. She returns to Greece, and during the train ride she recalls those past events. Before the beginning of the Greek-Italian war, she met Orestis . With the German invasion, Orestis, who was an officer in the Greek army, left for the Middle East. She followed him and accompanied him back to occupied Greece on a mission. She was arrested, interrogated and tortured and was finally sentenced to execution.

A magistrate reconstructs the murder of Costas Ghoussis, a labourer who was killed by his wife and her lover.

Fourtounakis’ daughter, Katerinio, is forced to get engaged with a brutal Cretan, Skandalakis. But the return of Manousos Vrontakis from Athens and his flirtation with the girl leads to a great romance, without them knowing that they belong to families who are longstanding enemies.

A young woman's struggle to overcome life's economic restrictions in order to meet her true will. She is twenty-three and lives with her mother, a compromise she can no longer stand. Despite her meager economic means, only enough to survive the first two months, she moves out and rents a 45m2 apartment of her own. During these two months of freedom, she explores her true self and approaches a more poetic and liberal culture, for her, a new way of life that slowly unfolds as she rummages through the belongings that the former renter, a guy her age, has left in the apartment.

Two friends from a small Greek town travel to Bulgaria and Switzerland, hoping they can gain money from the difference in foreign exchange rates.

During a hunting party on New Year's Eve 1976, five representatives of the bourgeoisie encounter with their companion the body of a partisan from the Civil War of the late forties. What they are most confused about is the fact that the corpse that lies at their feet is still bleeding…

The assassin of a prominent trade unionist takes a conservative MP hostage and the government prevaricates over tactics so as not to alienate potential political allies.

A journalist (Alekos Alexandrakis), working together with a young director (Peris Michailidis), tries to gather information about a family that was separated due to political turmoil. They locate some of its members, who tell their dramatic stories that began with the Civil War. The two men’s search is interrupted when a key person refuses to speak