| Position | Athina Rachel Tsangari |

COURAGEOUS AND FEARLESS FILMMAKING
By Yun-hua Chen

Like the title of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s debut feature, The Slow Business of Going, her filmmaking pace is also a slow business of filming. With the exception of Chevalier (2015), which arrived only five years after Attenberg (2010), she releases a feature film roughly every decade. In the intervals, she explores other creative avenues, crafting short films and TV series, including two episodes of the popular show Upload (2022). Her heartfelt connection to carefully selected projects and this sense of unhurriedness permeate her body of work: in Attenberg, human intimacy takes time to learn; in The Capsule (2012), prolonged training is required to mature into womanhood; and in Chevalier and Harvest (2024), it takes a journey—or even arson—to uncover the true nature of one’s travel companions or neighbors

Much like the protagonist in The Slow Business of Going—a woman who travels the world with a rocking chair—Tsangari’s characters navigate life with raw curiosity and childlike inquisitiveness. In The Capsule, they learn to become women; in Attenberg, Marina learns how to kiss with tongues; and in Harvest, Walter opens his eyes to the arrival of modernity and capitalism. Their unfiltered rawness becomes a lens for examining the genesis of human nature while critiquing the infantilization imposed by patriarchal societal structures that patronize and mansplain. With clarity unclouded by convention, Tsangari’s enfant-sauvage-like adults expose human interaction in its most unvarnished form. They inhabit surreal (or surreally real) settings, each serving as a rite of passage: waiting chambers for reckoning with misfitting identities, facing the loved one’s death, entering womanhood, proving their worth in a “best of us” contest, or abandoning a deceptively egalitarian farm.

Athina Rachel Tsangari © Stadtkino Filmverleih

In these human experiments of maturation, the spaces are confined: a remote seaside town overshadowed by a decaying factory, the tight quarters of a boat, or a secluded village bound by its insular community. These settings, transforming into chamber plays with no exits, reflect the inner disconnections of Tsangari’s characters, who, like creatures observed in an aquarium, are detached from societal entanglements and reduced to their primal emotional cores. Their seemingly puzzling behavior—performing quirky dances, donning a red rooster costume, or rolling shoulder blades like wings—may initially appear bizarre. Yet, these acts wordlessly and without music reveal the uncanny rapproachment between humans and animals. Here, animality becomes central. Tsangari’s characters mimic David Attenborough’s documentaries or engage in animalistic choreography—it is by embodying non-human forms that their humanity shines even brighter, and through an examination of outward behavior that their innermost psyches are laid bare.

What appears absurd and grostesque is, in fact, the essence of what is genuine and authentic. Tsangari’s distinctive use of unconventional songs and the distortion of human bodies slides into a metaphor for human interaction—a game, a struggle, a violent negotiation. The camera acts as a witness to this violence, recording both the physical and emotional sensations. In her exploration of awkwardness, which simultaneously exposes and mocks societal hypocrisy, Tsangari evokes a cold sensuality in bodies and minds that refuse to conform. This distinct approach has often linked her to the so-called “Greek Weird Wave,” a term that fails to fully capture the nuances of Greek cinema in the first decade of the century. What might appear “weird” is, at its heart, a cry of frustration—an irreconcilable conflict between the yearning to love a place and the impossibility of truly doing so. This dissonance reflects the experience of being trapped in a society that is sinking deeper into financial crisis, identity struggles, and social unrest. Time passes, normalizing injustices rooted in structural corruption and deeply-ingrained nepotism, leaving individuals powerless to effect political or socioeconomic change. Tsangari’s settings thus resemble “any-space-whatever”—ruined yet still inhabited. In these spaces, her seemingly eccentric characters are not eccentric because they misunderstand the world, but rather, because they grasp the world’s realities all too clearly and find themselves in profound discord with them.

In Tsangari’s latest work, Harvest, the act of map-drawing precipitates the village’s downfall. The map, drawn for the purpose of usurpation, mirrors the knowledge of sexuality in Attenberg and the awareness of womanhood in The Capsule. Naming and mapping things as they truly are becomes a merciless revelation—a knowledge that shatters the comfortable cocoon. A dangerous act, yet one that artists like Tsangari boldly and unflinchingly embrace.