At Vancouver Greek Film Festival, visual innovation throws light on social fracture
In series at The Cinematheque, vintage home-movie glow of Kyuka: Before Summer’s End and hallucinatory shades of Harvest reveal tension and crisis beneath domestic and communal surfaces
Kyuka: Before Summer’s End
Harvest
The Vancouver Greek Film Festival is at The Cinematheque from March 12 to April 1
TWO NEW FILMS bring an experimental buzz to The Cinematheque’s fifth annual Vancouver Greek Film Festival.
Screening March 14 and 22, Kyuka: Before Summer’s End is a family drama bathed in summer light but also prone to striking formal inventions. The debut feature by Kostis Charamountanis is so immediately seductive that you hardly notice how quietly its theme of masculine crisis sneaks up on you.
Elsa and Konstantinos (Elsa Lekakou and Konstantinos Georgopolous) are twins who join their single father, Babis (Simeon Tsakiris), for a summer boat tour of the island of Poros. He’s allegedly a crack fisherman and something of a hard-head. They’re way out of their element but make the most of a sun-drenched holiday by the sea, eventually falling in with another set of siblings. This will end with two families dining together on the boat and a shattering denouement for all.
Lurking behind all this is the viewer’s knowledge that Babis has engineered a meeting with the siblings’ long estranged mother. She abandoned her children at birth, but Kyuka doesn’t go where you expect. Babis’s ineptitude as an angler is comical for the most part, but it consumes the film and overrides the soapy plot about secrets and lies and fractured family life. Eventually, a male rival will contemptuously throw a shrimp at the beleaguered Babis, and we all know what that means.
You’ll also wish you were there on Poros, male psychodrama or not, in the endearing company of Elsa and Konstantinos. Beautifully lit and framed to mimic Super 8 home movies, not to mention early avant-garde cinema, the film otherwise wins us over with its daring technical choices, climaxing in a bravura end sequence when Charamountanis cross-cuts between two bombastic monologues and the growing intensity cracks the film open as if it was bombarded with gamma rays.
The equivalent technical marvels of Harvest deserve to be seen in a theatre. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari also skewered male insecurity with her 2015 audience favourite Chevalier, but Harvest is a very different beast, being a hallucinatory medieval fable more along the lines of A Field in England or Hard to Be a God. Sean Price Williams’s cinematography daubs rural Scotland with a blazing elemental palate, but the film also benefits from a customarily uncanny performance from Caleb Landry Jones. He is often too self-conscious an actor, but here Jones is ideal as Walter Thirsk, a sort of manager-without-portfolio to a farming village in the Middle Ages. Early scenes establish Walter as a quasi-mystic in tune with nature but also a rational force inside a community governed by superstition and old ways.
The arrival of a mapmaker, Earle (Arinzé Kene), signals the end of the community’s harmonic natural routines. Gradually, we learn that Earle works for an overbearing landowner bent on industrializing his property, too long neglected to peasants and ripe for profit. The villagers live in a brutish world and are hardly strangers to cruelty: two interlopers are sentenced to a week in the stocks while their witchy companion (Thalissa Teixeira) is banished to the wilderness with a freshly shaved head. But nothing matches the pitilessness of the dandy Edmund Jordan, played with vicious glee by Frank Dillane.
So yes, here we have a bedtime story about capitalism, partly brought to the screen in part by, no surprise, Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films. It’s also a strange and absorbing visual feast—you won’t see another film this year that includes death by urine—and it’s something of a graduation for filmmaker Tsangari, making her first English-language film after a long charter membership, to quote Festival curator Harry Killas, in the Greek Weird Wave.
Harvest closes a commendably diverse programme that begins March 12 with Michael Cacoyannis’s adaptation of Electra (1962) and otherwise includes Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets and the restoration of Pantelis Voulgaris’s kiss-off to the military junta, Happy Day, originally released in 1976, along with a triple bill of shorts by women filmmakers titled Greek Women Directors x 3. 
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