Memory as construction and as internal pulse. Spendo, on the edge of suicide, re-lives her life, re-constructs it and, finally, liberates herself. Sadness flows and fills the space. The hours co-exist and intertwine. The world: a flesh-eating mechanism. A descend begins, a rhythmic immersion into the depths of memory, where the evil appears in the form of good. Until memory no longer repeats itself; a new viewpoint sneaks in. The hours are noiselessly formed anew. Violent dependence is left in the past. The film’s narration is produced by the painful passage from entrapped temporal knots to a new flow. From the silence of muteness to the active tranquillity of contemplation.
Available for online screeening from 16 December
Antoinetta Angelidi (b.1950, 30th April) is a pioneer of Greek feminist and avant-garde cinema, and a visual artist. She studied Architecture in Athens, Greece; Film Direction and Editing at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, France; and Film Theory with Christian Metz. Her work includes four feature-length films – Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977), Topos (1985), The Hours - A Square Film (1995) and Thief or Reality (2001) –, as well as short films and art installations. It has been screened in international film festivals and contemporary art museums, as well as in theatres and national television. She uses art history and her dreams as raw material for her work, “distancing [herself] from reality in order to reach out to the Real”. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, constitute her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of the different filmic elements characterise her work. She taught for many years Film Direction in the Film School at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as well as the Universities of Patras, Thessaly and the Aegean. She is a member of the European Film Academy; and a founding member of the Hellenic Film Academy, and Women in Film and Television Greece. A retrospective tribute to her work was included in the 46th International Thessaloniki Film Festival (2005), where she was given the Golden Alexander Award for her lifetime achievement in cinema. A retrospective tribute to her work was also included in the Prismatic Ground Festival (2024) at Anthology Film Archives, New York, where she was given the Ground Glass Award for her outstanding contribution to the field of experimental media. A volume on her work in Greek was published by Thessaloniki Film Festival, and the volume in English ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi was published in ReFocus: The International Directors Series of Edinburgh University Press. Her intimate confession about her life and work, Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality (2022), was shot by her daughter Rea Walldén.
