Apples

Christos Nikou's Apples (Mila) was Greece's official Oscar submission for 2020 and won the Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival. The film was Nikou's debut feature, made after years assisting Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth and Richard Linklater on Before Midnight; it operates within the Greek Weird Wave aesthetic 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, with no one claiming him at the hospital — is enrolled in the New Identity programme: a state-sponsored protocol in which the patient receives a Polaroid camera and a daily series of cassette-tape instructions designed to produce a new biographical identity from scratch (ride a bicycle, attend a costume party, perform a one-night stand, watch a horror film with a stranger). His Polaroids accumulate. His real life, very slowly, begins to surface.

The film is unusually disciplined in its register: shot in Academy-ratio frame, almost entirely without affect, with a screenplay structured as bureaucratic instructions. Its central ethical question — whether identity is what happens to you, or what you decide to remember — sits beneath every Polaroid Aris Servetalis takes. The film became internationally consequential in part for arriving in 2020, when memory and isolation had taken on new public meaning.