The Years of the Big Heat

Returning to her small town, Anna, the widow of an Italian soldier whom she married during the occupation, revives her old teenage love in the face of a young worker, whom she marries with her stepdaughter, in order to keep him close to her. At the same time, a neighbour tries by all means to take her house to build a hotel.

Antonis Katsaris stars as a teacher in the small village of Zante who fights the growing desire of many locals to abandon the village for the big city or other countries. He works hard to organize traditional cultural events, such as outdoor performances of the traditional play I Chrissomalloussa, in order to solidify local values and a sense of identity. The teacher is aided by a young woman, a widow who has just returned from Germany and lives with her father-in-law. Kazan walks away with the film, as his sinister desires for his daughter-in-law are inflamed when he sees that she has fallen in love with the teacher. These developments lead him to whip up protests against the play by conservative locals, claiming that the teacher has changed the traditional story by adding elements of propaganda with the potential of causing peasant uprisings. The result is an unexpectedly violent example of social censorship.

Frieda Liappa in this short film casts an alternative gaze on the notion of historicity. Loukia is a teenager currently staying at her cousin’s house in Athens. Unlike her cousin she is timid and quite stressed for the school exam. She studies history. Between the lines of her book the historical events sprung up in a multidimensional way. Liappa transverses the dimensions of the real the imaginary and the symbolic. She invites the viewer to consider the construction of the filmic as well as the historical text. She succeeds in making a film with an open end and to leave room for our own contingent constructions.

A lower-class maid navigates the social world of the upper-crust family she works for.

Eirini and Stella are two old maids and sisters who have grown up in the provinces and now live in Athens, in an apartment that looks out onto an open-air cinema. They are almost forty, still virgins and dependent on each other. Their only relative is their cousin Stefanos, with whom they were both in love, but who has been away in Paris for years. When he comes back and visits them, the balance between the two women is upset.

Martha is unhappy with her life as it is at the moment, and among other issues, she has decided to give up her writing career. Along with that decision comes a need to get away from her husband and from her psychiatrist, with whom she has had more than just a doctor-patient relationship. As Martha travels through a deserted city landscape in a storm, the external world reflects something of her inner turmoil. Flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film to enhance the suspense of Martha's inner and outer journey.

In Athens, a radical female journalist and a former stage actor share their lives against the backdrop of the regime change, right after the fall of the military dictatorship and the first legislative elections in 1974.