Film
Every year, the Australian cinema calendar features more language-specific events such as the Greek Film Festival, attracting native speakers and art-house cinephiles alike. By Christos Tsiolkas.
The joys of attending the Greek Film Festival in Australia
How should we assess the abundance of language-specific film festivals that are now an entrenched part of the cinema calendar year? Most obviously, they indicate how the festival circuit is increasingly the dominant avenue through which an art-house cinema finds its audience.
Punch-drunk after the combined assaults of expanding digital technology in the home and the global pandemic, distributors and cinemas are increasingly wary of taking a punt on an extended season for a film that lacks big studio backing. Selling out three or four sessions over three weeks at the Spanish or German Film Festival is a possibility. Three or four sessions a day in a cinema, even for a week, risks attracting only a handful of people. Outside a festival, I have trouble recalling the last time I attended a film screening with a full or near-full house.
These festivals offer the opportunity to see films on the big screen, to immerse ourselves in the filmmakers’ visions and hopes, to grumble or argue or lament with friends afterwards at failed ambitions, or to exalt and celebrate a work that takes you by surprise. As many of these films will end up trashed by ads on SBS On Demand, where failures are amplified and moments of joy or wonder – the dazzling execution of a scene by a director and their editor, the freshness of a performance by an actor you’ve never seen before – are compromised by the limitations of the home-viewing experience, it is absolutely no surprise that festivals are increasingly popular.
I do wish they would take more risks. Given the vast global spread of the French language, for example, it is surprising how insular the programming for the French Film Festival is. Commercial considerations must play a part in this risk aversion. Yet there are opportunities to introduce audiences to under-explored national cinemas that should be animating the curators of these festivals.
An example of an elegantly programmed language festival is that of the yearly Czech & Slovak Film Festival. The organisers and programmers are clearly passionate and literate when it comes to Central European cinema, interested in showcasing how Czech and Slovak filmmakers are dealing with complex questions about contemporary European identity. It’s also clear that the programmers are equally knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the history of filmmaking traditions in the former Czechoslovakia. The retrospectives never feel perfunctory.
I always enjoy the Greek Film Festival. Like the Czech & Slovak Film Festival, it celebrates a European cinema less well known to an art-house audience. Given the historic legacy of Greek migration to Australia, there is always a pleasure in watching the films collectively. So many audience members know the language and get the jokes and references.
The Greek Film Festival has never had the curatorial assuredness of the Czech & Slovak Film Festival. It’s navigating between appealing to the bourgeois art-house audience and the migrant diaspora. This tension has often resulted in some truly memorable cinema experiences. I’ll never forget, years ago, being in the audience when the festival showed A Woman Under the Influence, John Cassavetes’s 1974 feminist masterpiece. The film is in English, and the protagonists are Italo-American, but among the film students watching the film for the first time was a sprinkling of older Greeks. Gena Rowlands is unforgettable as Mabel, a woman slowly being shredded existentially and psychically by the seemingly inadvertent but ultimately corrosive misogyny of her family life. I listened in to the mutterings of the older audience. And a large part of the audience clapped and hooted when one of the yiayia’s yelled out, in Greek: “Leave the bastard!”
One of the highlights of this year’s festival is the poignant documentary Two Homelands, directed by Kay Pavlou. Filmed last year, during the 50th anniversary of the devastating occupation of northern Cyprus by the Turkish state, the film is structured around interviews with refugees who have now lived most of their lives in Australia. Pavlou’s film is concise and focused resolutely on the refugee witnesses, most of them now octogenarians and nonagenarians: the eldest is 104.
The simplicity of the filmmaking might be misread as artlessness. I don’t think that’s the case. There’s a great trust between subject and filmmaker that accentuates the bittersweetness of the testimonies. The film can’t help resonating with the current tragedy of occupation and dispossession experienced by Palestinians. Yet the strength of the refugee communities, 50 years on, is also powerfully conveyed – an endurance both defiant and forbearing.
Another festival highlight is a retrospective of films by Pantelis Voulgaris. Born in 1940 just before the Nazi occupation, and growing up during the horrendous Greek Civil War, Voulgaris has inevitably dealt with the punishing political legacies of war, terror and dictatorship in his films. From his first works, he purposefully rejected a strict adherence to the experimentation and formalism that dominated the Greek art-house cinema of the late 1970s and 1980s. His ability to integrate melodrama into his political cinema is remarkable, and it never feels excessive or compromising.
It’s a Long Road (1998) and Brides (2004) are both impressive examples of his style and abilities, the first dealing with economic exploitation and alienation often invisible in Greek popular cinema, and the latter a deeply moving critique of how patriarchy affects the experience of migration. Victoria Haralabidou and Evi Saoulidou both give stunning performances in that film. One of Voulgaris’s most ravishingly beautiful films is Little England (2013) – possibly his most ecstatically melodramatic work. The chance to see Voulgaris’s films on the big screen is not to be missed.
You can miss Uberto Pasolini’s truly awful The Return, with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It is an attempt at a revisionist take on Homer. Unlike Enda Walsh’s great play Penelope, which offered a caustic rereading of the story but structurally and dramatically imbued it with an alternative feminist allegorical authority, Pasolini strips away the myth to no effect. Fiennes is directed to play Odysseus as King Lear, but the script is so woefully crude in its language that his exaggerated tragic posturing seems ridiculous.
For the first time in more than 30 years of watching her on screen, Binoche bored the shit out of me. She’s been directed to be prissy and smug, as if that somehow conveys her boldness. Worse still is Charlie Plummer, whose performance as Telemachus is execrable – all adolescent whining. In fact, this turgid film is only adolescent whining. Uberto Pasolini is not related – in any way – to the great Pier Paolo Pasolini.
I’m being mean about The Return, both because the film deserves it and because its inclusion in the festival obviously ticks the boxes of so many of the language film festivals: big-name international casts, quasi-intellectual narratives, safe and rote filmmaking that won’t upset the post-movie dinner chitchat. Thankfully, in the case of this year’s Greek Film Festival, it seems to be the exception.
Worth a million of The Return is The Flea (1990), directed by Dimitris Spyrou, which I haven’t seen since its release 35 years ago. My memories of it are still vivid. Its realist depiction of village life in rural Greece in the 1960s is gripping and moving. A great film about childhood.
I’m aching to see the director’s cut of Costas Ferris’s Rembetiko (1983). I remember it as a sprawling, confused melodrama that related the history of a woman whose life was caught up in the appalling “exchange of populations” that was the tragic foundation of both the modern Greek and Turkish states. Even if confused, the resonance of the musical sequences, the celebration of the rembetiko – the Greek blues – that the refugees brought with them in their dispossession, have remained with me over the decades. Its musical sequences are magnificent. To see the film as Ferris always intended it will be one of the year’s cinematic delights.
If for that alone, I am glad for the language film festivals. At their best, they screen new work, but they also remind us that the play between heritage and transformation is part conflict and part emergence. That’s as true for language as it is for cinema.
The Greek Film Festival runs October 14-26 in cities across Australia.
ARTS DIARY
FESTIVAL Melbourne International Games Week 2025
Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, until October 12
CABARET Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes
Belvoir St Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until November 9
LITERATURE Brisbane Writers Festival
Venues throughout Meanjin, October 9-12
CULTURE Bilong Papua New Guinea: 50 Years of Independence
National Gallery of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, until April 12
MULTIMEDIA Trudi Pollard: Captured by Colour
Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, Whadjuk Noongar Country, until October 25
FESTIVAL Darkfield Newcastle
Venues throughout Awabakal and Worimi Country, until October 12
LAST CHANCE
EXHIBITION Kimono
NGV International, Naarm/Melbourne until October 5
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Feast of nations".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
