Apples

Christos Nikou's Apples (Mila) was Greece's official Oscar submission for 2020, and at the Chicago International Film Festival it won the Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay and the FIPRESCI Prize. It was Nikou's debut feature, made after years assisting Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth and Richard Linklater on Before Midnight, and it works within the Greek Weird Wave manner that Lanthimos had defined a decade earlier.

In a near-future Athens, a mysterious pandemic causes sudden and irreversible amnesia in otherwise healthy adults. A middle-aged man (Aris Servetalis), found unidentified on a public bus and claimed by no one at the hospital, is enrolled in the New Identity programme. The state hands him a Polaroid camera and a daily cassette of instructions meant to build a new biography from scratch: ride a bicycle, go to a costume party, have a one-night stand, watch a horror film with a stranger. Each task is to be photographed, and the Polaroids pile up.

Nikou keeps an unusually tight grip on the register: an Academy-ratio frame, performances almost without affect, a screenplay built like a set of bureaucratic instructions. Under every Polaroid that Aris Servetalis takes sits the film's ethical question, whether identity is what happens to you or what you decide to remember. Part of its international reach came from timing: it arrived in 2020, when memory and isolation had taken on a new public meaning.