Greek filmmaker Alexis Alexiou arrived at Thessaloniki International. The Film Festival’s third feature, “Sea of Glass,” is fresh off its out-of-competition premiere in Edinburgh. The moody, noir-inspired drama will have a special screening in Thessaloniki before a limited release across Greece on November 12.
Best known for its Tribeca premiere, “Wednesday 4:45” — a glossy Athens-set crime thriller that wears its debt to Michael Mann on its neon-filled sleeve — Alexiou’s latest film is set in the off-season in an unassuming resort town on the island of Evia, an atmospheric place he describes as “country gothic noir.”
The film stars Evangelia Andreadaki (“Arcadia,” “Little England”) as Vangelio, a 65-year-old woman trapped in the thankless routine of caring for her abusive, bedridden husband. A prisoner in his own home, he contents himself with going through his collection of old guidebooks and daydreaming about the sea. But then the sudden death of her husband prompts her to make a “reckless” decision: to go on vacation.
While booking a room in a shabby establishment on the outskirts of Evia’s capital, Chalkida, he meets Vicky, played by tough-as-nails Christiana Matelska Toka, a twenty-something who runs the family business while caring for her alcoholic father (Michalis Iatropoulos). When his overbearing nature turns violent one night, Vangelio steps in to protect the young woman, setting the stage for a stormy confrontation and eventual escape for liberation.
“Sea of Glass” is written by Alexiou and Afroditi Nikolaidou and produced by Tugo Tugo Prods in Greece. In co-production with Portokal (Bulgaria) and Bark Like a Cat Films (Cyprus) and in collaboration with Felony Film (Cyprus), Marni Films (Greece), Jungle Films (Greece) and Cinnerent (Serbia). Alongside the main stars are Nikos Georgakis (“Truants”), Thanos Tokakis (“Tokakis or What is My Name”) and Dimitris Tzoumakis (“Wednesday 4:45”). Simon Sarketzis (“Little England,” “Behind the Haystacks”) served as director of photography.
To talk Diversity Ahead of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Alexiou says the black country has been praised as a “magnificent, moody Greek tragedy”. Diversity‘s chief film critic, Guy Lodge, was inspired by movies like “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Cape Fear” and “Thelma & Louise.” It started with a simple treatment that Nikolaidou wrote over the course of a day – as Alexiou describes it: “Two women stuck in the middle of nowhere in a bad seaside resort who unexpectedly come together to confront their own pasts.”
“Family relationships are at the core of the story,” says the director. Both women, albeit from opposite sides of the generation divide, are stuck in dysfunctional parent-child dynamics. As Vicky endures abuse from her overbearing father, Vangelio must reckon with her own regrets as a mother and consider how her willingness to silently endure her husband’s violent nature has had a lasting impact on her now-adult sons.
Alexiou references the central idea of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” – “a lone hero who comes to town and upsets the balance of the small-town community” – explaining how he and Nikolaidou decided to give the film a contemporary twist; where instead of an intense love affair, the film revolves around “two women seeking friendship and solidarity.”
They find them in the most unlikely places. “There is absolutely nothing interesting in the petty-bourgeois seaside resort of Evia,” says Nikolaidou, who grew up frequently visiting his family’s holiday home in such a resort town. “You come there by chance because you can’t find a room or a table anywhere else, or because your grandmother has prescribed a beach holiday.”
Still, he says these seaside towns have a “secret side”; This creates an ideal backdrop for a noir crime drama.
“These small-town resorts, like the rest of invisible Greece, were places of brutality: during the hottest summer months, girls were locked in seaside apartments to avoid falling into the hands of men, or forced to serve middle-class Athenian holidaymakers in local taverns,” says Nikolaidou. “These little seaside resorts…haven’t changed much since then. And the ‘Sea of Glass’ carries the memories and scars of this hibernating world.”
The soil also preserves these memories. The area where “Sea of Glass” was filmed was once covered in marshland until developers attempted to reclaim the marshy areas by building large apartment blocks in the 1970s and 80s. But decades later, the situation began to turn. “Slowly nature is starting to take over the area again,” says Alexiou. “Man is always struggling to tame nature, to shape the landscape, to take care of it.
“After all, nature has its own will,” he says, drawing a parallel between the stubborn nature of his film and the young hero who refuses to be tamed. “He will come back and fight.”
Thessaloniki Film Festival will be held between 5-15 November.