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. The film established Tsangari, until then primarily known as a producer of Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinetta and Dogtooth, as a major director in her own right within the Greek Weird Wave. Lanthimos himself plays a substantial supporting role in the film as Marina's prospective lover.

Marina (Ariane Labed) is a twenty-three-year-old woman living in a decaying coastal industrial town in Greece — Aspra Spitia, a real factory town built around a 1960s alumina plant. She navigates 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, particularly its sexual register, far stranger than 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 structured around a series of slowly choreographed walking-and-singing sequences between Marina and Bella, modelled visually on Belgian director Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville. Labed's performance — physical, deadpan, finally tender — is one of the great central performances of the Greek Weird Wave; she would later star in Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps and Tsangari's subsequent Chevalier.