07/09/2010

Attenberg [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Athina Rachel Tsangari
film profile], Greece’s first entry in Venice’s Official Selection after a six-year absence, will be leading the country’s presence in the Toronto International Film Festival (Sep 9-19). The film, which is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sophomore project, is the story of a dying architect and his emotionally stunned daughter, who inhabit the remains of a derelict industrial community. Attenberg will be screened at the festival’s Discovery section.

Also in Toronto, after having screened in Locarno’s International Competition section, Hair by Tayfun Pirselimoglu will be representing Greece and Turkey.

Co-produced by the two countries, though only via private funding from Graal SA as far as Greece is concerned, Hair revolves around the illicit affair between a dying wig maker and his hair supplier, a married woman who sparks the cancer-ridden man’s obsessive interest, turning him into a stalker who decides to murder her husband.

Produced by Veysal Ipek for Zuzi Film and Nikos Moustakas for Graal SA, Hair marks the second collaboration between Moustakas and Pirselimoglu, after their Berlinale screened Haze. Moreover, along with Riza and Haze, Hair is the final chapter in Pirselimoglu’s trilogy of bizarre compulsions of lives in extreme situations.

The film will be screened in Toronto’s City to City programme, which this year focuses on Istanbul, also featuring Reha Erdem’s My Only Sunshine, another Greek/Turkish co-production, funded by Turkey’s Atlantik Film and Kaboal Pictures, and Greece’s Cinegram, the production house founded by Despina Mouzaki, previous director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and now member of the European Film Academy’s board of directors.