Inspired by Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Sigmund Freud’s essay on it, as well as by the empty squares painted by Giorgio de Chirico. The uncanny atmosphere of summer noon in Ermoupolis. The film is a fusion of fiction and documentary, essay and performance. It develops the theme of Grandiva but also records the process of teaching film to young performers during the Summer Academy of the National Theatre of Greece. The narrative units of the film are simultaneously exercises on film acting, as well as live performances that took place in the urban space of Ermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, in the summer of 2006.

Available for online screeening from 12 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.