NIKOS PAPATAKIS

Loosely inspired by the turbulent life of Jean Genet and starring the great Michel Piccoli, Nikos Papatakis' last film is a fascinating exercise in the balance between lust and toxicity. — In the 1960s, a famous gay writer and poet, a lover of the circus and its extreme dangers, makes it his sole purpose to turn a young Arab into the best tightrope walker in the world.

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. — 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. — Best Screenplay | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986 Hellenic Association of Film Critics Best Film Award | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1986

In his most provocative and hard-hitting film, Nikos Papatakis mercilessly attacks all forms of authority and leads his then-wife Olga Karlatos in a magnificent and sweepingly paroxysmal performance. — A director is making a film about torture in Algeria. His wife portrays an Algerian prisoner. In order to be able to play her role more convincingly, she is subjected to various tortures. Reality and fiction are constantly entwined, until her life becomes an unrelenting humiliation.

Nikos Papatakis' explosive directorial debut made it to Cannes in 1963, was likened to Bunuel's best works, never won an award for fear of nationalist organizations and remains to this day an unparalleled cinematic poem. — Two sisters work as maids in an isolated farmhouse unpaid, due to their bosses' financial difficulties. The announcement of the sale of the house brings them to the brink of insanity and they end up slaughtering their employers. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1963

Yorgos Lanthimos' favourite film, shot just before the rise of the dictatorship, spoke through its history and frames about exactly how Greece at the time was a society that favoured the rise of dictatorship. A unique film for Greek cinema of the era, unmissable to this day. — A poor shepherd, Thanos, falls in love with a beautiful noblewoman, Despina, who is the daughter of Vlachopoulos, the lord of the region. Her father, naturally, categorically refuses to give his daughter to a side-child and tries to marry her off to Yago, the son of a big landowner. Thanos and Despina elope and flee to the mountains, pursued by a detachment of gendarmes and by Yago who, deeply offended, seeks revenge. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 1967