Attenberg

Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress (Ariane Labed) at Venice 2010 and was Greece's official Oscar submission for the Best Foreign Language Film. Until then Tsangari had been known mainly as the producer of Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinetta and Dogtooth; this film made her a major director of the Greek Weird Wave in her own right. Lanthimos himself has a substantial supporting role in it, as Marina's prospective lover.

Marina (Ariane Labed) is a twenty-three-year-old woman living in Aspra Spitia, a decaying industrial town on the Greek coast, a real factory town built around a 1960s alumina plant. She looks at the world with the detached curiosity of a nature documentarian. She watches David Attenborough programmes (the title is a phonetic mishearing of his name) and finds human behaviour, sexual behaviour above all, far stranger than anything in the animal kingdom. Her closest relationships are with her terminally ill architect father (Vangelis Mourikis) and her fiercely impatient friend Bella (Evangelia Randou).

The film is punctuated by a series of slowly choreographed walking-and-singing sequences between Marina and Bella, modelled visually on the Belgian director Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville. Labed's performance (physical, deadpan and tender underneath) is one of the great central performances of the Greek Weird Wave; she went on to star in Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps and in Tsangari's next feature, Chevalier.