Greek Weird Wave

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This book is the first to provide a reading of the recent ‘Weird’ or ‘New Wave’ of Greek cinema, both through the concept of biopolitics and in the context of contemporary World Cinema politics, aesthetics, as well as production and circulation strategies. Its main aim is to show the ways in which, since the beginning of the 21st century, cinema and other cultural forms in Greece have responded to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now come to call biopolitics. Through close cultural and film analysis, the Greek Weird Wave is proposed as a paradigmatic cinema of biopolitical realism, a trend observable more widely in world cinema today. Key films such as Yorgos Lantimos’s Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, Syllas Tzoumerkas’s Homeland, Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence and Panos H. Koutras’s Strella, are read together with less well-known short, medium and feature-length films by directors such as Konstantina Kotzamani, Yorgos Zois, Vassilis Kekatos, Alexandros Voulgaris, Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Babis Makridis. At the same time, the book offers an analysis of the larger cultural context of 21st-century Greece, often explaining the films’ major thematic and formal choices through references to contemporary novels, theatre performances, activist texts and political events.