Red City: Greek poetry as cinema
- Director Manos Cizek adapts the poetry of two fellow Greeks in the film Red City, which premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival
The section of Greek films presented at this year's Thessaloniki Film Festival is heavy on films that in some way seem to metabolize the current economic crisis and the crisis in Greek morals and values that seems to accompany it.
Red City, from director Manos Cizek is just such a film. A semi-experimental adaptation of the poetry of Dinos Christianopoulos and Maria Tataraki, Red City offers a vision of a dystopian and futuristic Athens, where the atmosphere is troubled due to a "malfunction in the android community", which has lead several androids to commit crimes for which they are now wanted by the police.
As the film looks at how humans interact with pre-programmed (yet very human-looking) robots, it probes the mysteries of humanity and the human condition, though some of the analogies might be lost in translation for foreign audiences.
The film cuts between stories of several characters as if it were a prolonged, lyrical music video, with situations including a lively discussion of the merits and science of the non-human characters between two scientists, seen as silhouettes against a whiskey-coloured window; a woman who discusses her piano-playing android with a female friend; a tramp living on the streets and a group of Greek goddesses in a virginal forest.
The soundtrack is busy with new-agey music that includes Moby and is supplemented by audio that includes a speech by Adolf Hitler and a Muslim call to prayer, further adding to the various voices in the film.
Divided into chapters (The City; The People; The Machines), the whole is a poetic vision of a country in disarray, trying to find what there's left of the humanity that binds us. Cizek occasionally cuts to footage of Greek police during recent riots, underlining how this not-too-distant future is really an allegory for what is happening in the country now.
The film was produced by New York Entertainment Group.
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