Stella Theodoraki

Everyone carries something, some burden that weighs him down. Some are crushed, others are freed, others just carry on. Eleven characters cross each others paths, unveiling their fears and desires, during the world weightlifting championship

A woman is trying to forget her traumatic past by living a parallel, fictional life.

On a crowded beach in Greece, during the summer, the bodies of two refugee women wash ashore. Elli, a young woman with her dog, witnesses the harsh reality and decides not to look away.

In a tale rooted in ancient Greek tragedy, a patriarch must decide the fate of his son and the boy he raised when a long-standing unneighbourly feud turns to murder.

A Greek filmmaker plans to shoot a film, following the footsteps of the Greek revolutionary Rigas Feraios. While visiting the cemetery, a small crowd of ghosts of the 18th century personalities decides to follow his path.

A man gets out of prison. Like a modern Ulysses he will undertake a homeless journey into contemporary Athens peopled by migrants, homeless, and other marginalized persons of the society. On his way he will meet a woman and a little girl. Are the three of them members of a disrupted family or just persecutors and victims of a violent and conflict driven society that prevents them from living together?

The director creates a parallel of thirty years of her life (mid-1980s to 2012) and the evolution of her country, Greece. The loss of her lover, revived in archive photographs and 8 mm movies, is the background for her despair facing contemporaneous Greece, seen by her in the streets and viewed on television broadcasts from American and Russian channels.

Greece, Russia, USA, Brazil, China, Senegal. Meeting young people in these countries we heard a ‘Rumble’ foretelling an impending explosion. The fall of communism, crisis of capitalism, ecological catastrophes, migration waves, globalization. The new generation is at the forefront, exposed, helpless without being able to envision a more optimistic future. This ‘Rumble’ comes from this young generation. Their words, images, sounds and music compose the notes of an audio-visual symphony entitled: ‘The Rumble of the World’.

Olga, a domestic worker originally from Albania, finds herself in a house she works in downtown Athens, at the right time. Or at the wrong one?

A deep, unfulfilled love within an erotic triangle. A story of trust and betrayal. A story of present-day Athens, of onlookers, of hesitation. Where holding back is normal, no matter how self-destructive.

Four women, sterilized and under constant toxic restraint and surveillance, serve their term in a government-run brothel. Their relations are at a critical point; food and water are scarce, their house is rotting and ready to collapse, nothing on the outside exists any more. Nightmarish visions, simulated miscarriages, injections and nausea comprise their daily routine. Yet their dream – although they have been sterilized by the State – is to have a child. One day, a customer disappears and the interrogation begins...

Iris, a teacher in her early forties who works at a Fine Arts School, assigns to her students an exercise on a Free Subject. It is a time when social behaviours and values are being called into question. The 20-year-old students are thrilled at the idea of being free to choose their own subjects. They create an “imagination factory” that has no limits. After finding Iris’s lost cell phone, provocative Yorgos, bases his Free Subject on his fictitious recreation of his teacher’s life. Free Subject deals with the limits of individual freedom in contemporary Western societies.