Greek cinema is shining, women directors are gaining global recognition, and cult films are quietly carving out their legendary status.

Normal

In the first of two episodes of the legendary TV Decalogue that became feature films, director Krzysztof Kieslowski launches a blistering cinematic diatribe against the death penalty.

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Jacek is a 20-year-old who finds no meaning in life. He wanders the city with the thought of killing someone. Marian, a grumpy middle-aged taxi driver, eventually becomes his accidental victim. The young man asks the taxi driver to take him to an isolated location, where he eventually murders the driver in cold blood.

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Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1988
FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1988
Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1988

A Short Film about Killing

The Birkin VS the Varda family, literally. The French director reflects on a taboo subject in an incredibly paradoxical manner and presents her version of what ideal love might be; rather impossible.

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At her daughter's party, a mother meets one of the girl’s 14-year-old classmates; he is drunk and she helps him get sober. The woman and the teenager start looking for opportunities to meet, which initially means going to arcades with his favorite game, Kung Fu Master. Gradually, however, the relationship turns romantic and their encounters more and more careless, until her daughter sees them kissing. Where will all this lead?

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Official Selection | Berlin International Film Festival | 1988

Kung-fu Master!

Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces.

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Georg, his wife Anna and their daughter Eva lead a seemingly quiet middle-class life, but when Eva pretends she has become blind, something odd rises to the surface. During the next three years, the family alienates themselves from the world and each other until, suddenly, their lives self-destruct.

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Ernest Artaria Award | Locarno Film Festival | 1989

The Seventh Continent

A map of Paris that resembles a children’s board game and a plot born from the imagination of the director and his leading ladies are the starting point for a dark, yet enchanting quest through ‘70s France, in one of Jacques Rivette’s most famous films.

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Marie, a bank robber just out of prison, can no longer bear to live between four walls. Baptiste says she comes from somewhere else and intends to live by her own rules. They keep running into each other on the streets of Paris and finally become companions in a very strange and very weird, mysterious adventure that includes a secret map of Paris, and murky figures from the criminal world.

The North Bridge

Through glimpses into the past and stories of people who came across her path, Agnes Varda forms the portrait of a life lost, supported by a hauntingly raw performance by Sandrine Bonnaire.

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The film begins with a young woman’s misshapen dead body lying in a ditch. An invisible journalist points his camera at the last men who saw her and the one who found her. In flashbacks, we see her hanging out with homeless people, with a worker from Tunisia, a professor studying trees and a girl who envies her unfettered existence. The woman used to work in an office, but decided to leave her "normal" life behind and become a wanderer.

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Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 1985
FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1985 
OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985

Vagabond

An anarchist creator condenses all the conflicts of the time from the Civil War to the regime change (Metapolitefsi), through an allegorical story in the form of a modern tragedy. Papatakis draws inspiration from a true incident somewhere in Spain, to talk about a wounded homeland.

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During the Greek dictatorship, a young man flees for Paris, where he seeks help from a lonely, misanthropic distant relative who owns a fur processing workshop. He carries with him the photo of a singer whom he presents as his sister, creating a series of misunderstandings which drag him into a vicious circle of successive lies and fantasies. The furrier will fall in love with the girl in the photo.

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Best Screenplay | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986
Hellenic Association of Film Critics Best Film Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986

The Photograph

Truffaut's last film pays tribute to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, which the French director adored. Pairing it with the conventions of film noir, he produces a delightfully cinephile union.

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Based on Charles Williams' "The Long Saturday Night", the film takes place over a few days in a small town in southern France. The manager of a real estate agency is a suspect for the double murder of his wife and her lover. Faced with evidence against him as well as the charge of a third murder, the man escapes. Meanwhile, his secretary, conducting her own research to uncover the truth, gets entangled in difficult situations.

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Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | BAFTA Awards | 1984

Confidentially Yours - Finally Sunday!

One of the great independent American films of the 90s, Metropolitan is a brilliant and witty romantic comedy about the end of the American aristocracy that earned the - then first-time writer-director Whit Stillman an Oscar nomination for Screenwriting.

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In an apartment on Manhattan a couple of friends from the New York upper-class meet almost every night to talk about social mobility, play bridge, and discuss Fourier's socialism; the cynical Nick, the philosophical Charlie, party girl Sally, and Austenite Audrey. They are joined by Tom. His background is much simpler, and he is critical of their way of life. But he finds a soul mate in Audrey, who begins to fall in love with him.

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Nomination for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1990
Official Selection | Sundance Film Festival | 1990
Best Director Award | Locarno Film Festival | 1990

Metropolitan

Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival in 1986 for one of the gems of Éric Rohmer's filmography, a film as rare and precious as its legendary finale scene with the green ray at sunset.

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A young girl runs out of town just before summer vacation and seeks to find the antidote to loneliness and boredom in the "green light" of a sunset which, according to Jules Verne, gives anyone who sees it the ability to clarify feelings of.

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Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 1986
FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1986
Pasinetti Award for Best Actress (Marie Rivière) | Venice Film Festival | 1986
Golden Ciak Award | Venice Film Festival | 1986

The Green Ray

Free will? What is that? A cynical deconstruction of life’s unpredictability owing to an innovative combination of fiction and documentary by Alain Resnais, which dissociates us from fairy tales and encourages us to look at ourselves in the face - along with a few mice.

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The intersecting stories of three people and the important decisions they have to take at some point in their lives, are used to develop Henri Laborit's theories about human behavior and the relationship between individuals and society.

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Nominated for Best Screenplay | Oscars | 1981
FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1980
Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1980
AGIS Award | Venice Film Festival | 1980

My American Uncle

The fear of middle age is turned on its head to create a sense of freedom. Jane Birkin once confessed to Agnes Varda that turning 40 terrified her, so the director decided to create her portrait. A playful and original film and an exploration of the sacred bond between director and actor.

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A kaleidoscopic examination and study of the actress as a woman, mother, muse, idol. The scenes of the "real" Jane Birkin, makeup-free and expressing a desire to be seen "as if I were as transparent, as anonymous as everyone else", are edited with cinematic fantasies of both the actress and director, in the form of renaissance portraits, comedies, thrillers.

Jane B. for Agnes V.

The film that Stanley Kubrick described as the scariest he ever saw, haunted a whole generation of viewers at the end of the 80s, with zero effects, exaggerations or metaphysical loans, just based on a shocking disappearance story and a finale engraved in the memory of those who have watched it.

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Rex and Saskia, a couple in love, are on vacation. During their trip they make a stop at a busy service station, where Saskia vanishes and a search adventure begins for Rex. He looks for her everywhere, until one day three years later, he receives a card from someone that knows what happened to his wife.

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Best Supporting Actress | European Film Awards | 1988

The Vanishing

In the second of the two episodes of the legendary TV Decalogue that became feature films, Krzysztof Kieslowski, composes a beautiful ode about reaching maturity and the notion of incomplete love.

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A 19-year-old postman feels that his life is gaining meaning when he starts watching the apartment of a beautiful neighbor with his telescope, but never dares to confess his love to her.

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OCIC Award | San Sebastián Film Festival | 1988
Special Prize of the Jury | San Sebastián Film Festival | 1988
Audience Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 1989

A Short Film about Love

An absurdist comedy with intertwining story lines played out over several time frames, all linked by an 18th century chinaware set and a 19th century portrait. Iosselliani, one of the most criminally overlooked filmmakers nowadays, has constructed an intricate and surreal episodic Rubik's cube.

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Jewelry, porcelain, paintings... all lovingly created, then sold, given as gifts, destroyed, stolen, resold. Both good and bad deeds pass them from hand to hand; others link people together. The objects fly about and feelings do too.

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Grand Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1984
OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1984

Favourites of the Moon

In his first collaboration with screenwriter Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieslowski unfolds for the first time the themes that were destined to define his later work: loss, death and the endless search for meaning in the limitless improbabilities of life.

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A dead lawyer watches from the afterlife the lives of his wife and son, but also the course of a political prisoner's case, which has been taken over by a more pragmatic colleague.

No End

With a blend of harsh realism and aching humanity, Héctor Babenco’s fully restored by Film Foundation "Pixote" offers an electrifying look at youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society in the 80s.

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The life of a boy on the streets of Sao Paulo who, after escaping a nightmarish reformatory, will resort to a life of violent crime, even as he forms a makeshift family with some fellow outcasts.

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Special Jury Prize | Locarno Film Festival | 1981
Honourable Mention | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1981
Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 1982

Pixote

Based on the wonderful anthology scene at the train station, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski explores the mechanisms of fate and chance in one of his greatest cinematic moments.

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A young medical student who has temporarily stopped his studies, runs to catch the train. Three different versions of this effort will lead to three different outcomes of his life.

Blind Chance

Delve deeper into David Lynch's labyrinthine, surreal, nightmarish universe with these eerie, hallucinatory shorts that reflect both the origins and evolution of his unique style.

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A grizzled, hard-of-hearing cowboy, Silm, and his two friends capture a mysterous, well-dressed Frenchman.

The Cowboy and the Frenchman

The great Claire Denis's first feature film remains the best cinematic capture of the vastness and warmth of the African continent, reflected through the end of colonialism and the fragmentation of memory.

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A French woman returns to her ancestral home in Cameroon, the first colonial plantation, and there she remembers her childhood, with an emphasis on her unexpected relationship with a black servant.

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Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1988

Chocolate

With three awards at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival, the third of the six-part “Comedies and Proverbs” anthology is another exquisite specimen of Rohmer’s cinema, featuring masterfully crafted dialogue and the unbearable lightness of youth.

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A sixteen-year-old girl visits the coast of Normandy for her summer vacation, ready to dive into the dark waters of love. What she discovers instead is what hypocrites adults can be.

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Best Director | Berlin Film Festival | 1983
FIPRESCI Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1983
OCIC Award - Honorable Mention | Berlin Film Festival | 1983

Pauline at the Beach

One of Pantelis Voulgaris' most famous films and at the same time one of the most important moments in contemporary Greek cinema, this Venice and Thessaloniki award-winning story of doomed love is still moving and thrilling.

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The story of a young left-wing couple from the early post-civil war years to the post-communist revolution of 1974, during the harsh years of lawlessness, persecution, arrests and imprisonment.

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Special Mention for Best Performance (Themis Bazaka) | Venice Film Festival | 1985
Specia Mention - OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985
Best Film | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1985
Best Actress (Themis Bazaka) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1985

Stone Years

Inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear and a 16th-century Japanese myth, Ran is Kurosawa's last major cinematic epic, for which he received his only nomination for the Best Director Oscar. It is considered one of the greatest films of all time.

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At the age of seventy, after years of consolidating his empire, the Grand Lord decides to abdicate and divide his realm among his three sons. Taro, the eldest, will rule. Jiro, his second son, and Saburo will take over the command of the Second and Third Castles, but given their obedience and support to their older brother. Saburo breaks his promise of obedience and is exiled.

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Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1986
Nomination for Best Director | Oscars | 1986
Best Foreign Language Film | BAFTA | 1987
OCIC Award for Best Director | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1985

Globalization, consumerism, and the dead ends of modern lifestyle enter the mixer of an explosive satire and produce a vitriolic yet unbearably entertaining film that ranks among the best moments in John Carpenter's career.

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A worker from Los Angeles accidentally finds a pair of special glasses on the street that were probably never meant to come into his hands. Wearing them, he can see the subliminal messages behind every billboard or government announcement that nurture a world of people who stop thinking. Soon, he discovers a group of aliens behind this plan and takes it upon himself to awaken humanity.

They Live

"With or without you". Truffault distillates in one phrase and one film the crazy erotic passion that leads cursed lovers Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu to a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster.

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A couple with a young son lives happily in a village outside Grenoble. One day, a married couple moves next to them and, to the man’s surprise, his new neighbor is an old lover. Soon, the two former lovers secretly rekindle their relationship, until their lies can no longer be contained.

The Woman Next Door

Based on a true story, this powerful drama of abortions and prostitution during World War II, is one of Isabelle Huppert’s finest collaborations with the great Claude Chabrol, and gave the actress a completely fair award in the 1988 International Venice Film Festival.

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In German-occupied France during World War II, struggling to make ends meet when her husband returns home after being wounded in the war, a poor woman tries to earn money and support her family by performing illegal abortions.

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Golden Ciak Award for Best Film | Venice Film Festival | 1988
Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) | Venice Film Festival | 1988

1980s