Greek director and Talents Sarajevo alumnus Minos Nikolakakis has just wrapped shooting his debut feature, Entwined [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], and is aiming to enter post-production soon. The film is a contemporary fairy tale inspired by Greek and Balkan legends, and rural customs revolving around the supernatural, and was shot entirely in Greece.

Entwined follows a graduate doctor (Prometheus Aleifer), an emotionally detached rationalist, who leaves the city life behind him in order to offer his services in a remote village. There, he falls in love with a peasant girl (Anastasia-Rafaela Konidi), despite the opposition of the superstitious villagers. They guard her fiercely in an isolated woodland farmhouse, as the girl suffers from a rare condition that causes her skin to resemble tree bark. It doesn’t take the doctor long to realise that she is not human, and she is looking for the love that will prevent her from turning into a tree. His ordered life is totally shattered, and he’s forced to question his logical worldview and accept a part of himself he can no longer deny.

Nikolakakis, who co-penned the script with John de Holland, started the development of the project at MIDPOINT, and at Talents Sarajevo in 2014, where he won the Pack and Pitch Award. In 2015, the project also participated in Balkan Film Connection in Belgrade and in the Istanbul Film Festival’s Meetings on the Bridge, and in 2016, it took part in the Tirana Film Festival’s TIFForum, organised by TorinoFilmLab.

Entwined was shot over the course of 30 days in remote villages and ancient forests on the Peloponnese peninsula, deep in the mountains of Parnon. The director says: “Our goal was to remain faithful to the archetypes of the Balkan folk-tale legends, and this unique landscape, the birthplace of many ancient Greek myths, reflects the protagonist’s external (and internal) journey in a natural world with its own rules. Deep down it tells the story of two worlds meeting: an expanding, modern world and an ancient one; rationalism against the disappearing mystique of nature; the mind versus animal instinct.”

Entwined is a Greek-UK co-production by Minos Nikolakakis and Lilette Botassi via Authorwave, Multivision and Melancholy Star, and it is being executive-produced by Inkas Films. The film is supported by the Greek Film Centre, ERT SA and the administrative region of Peloponnese.