Miss Violence

Alexandros Avranas's Miss Violence won the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Themis Panou) at Venice in 2013. It put Avranas alongside Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari among the central figures of the Greek Weird Wave, the movement that came out of the Greek economic crisis after 2010. Its reception at Venice was sharply divided (some critics walked out), which made the jury's double award all the more of a statement.

On her eleventh birthday, Angeliki jumps from the family balcony, and the film deliberately offers no context for the act. As police and social services investigate what the family insists was an accident, it slowly opens up the daily life of the household around her: her grandfather (Themis Panou), grandmother (Reni Pittaki), mother (Eleni Roussinou), aunt and the wider family. The investigation is a structural device, letting the film's real subject, what has been going on inside the household for the past decade, surface in fragments.

Avranas stages everything in a clinical deadpan: long static frames, no musical score, a steady refusal of conventional emotional emphasis. That coldness is why its moral and political reception has never stopped being argued over. It is a character study and a critical portrait of contemporary Greek society, and as provocation it goes further than most of the Weird Wave. The Venice prizes were the strongest international endorsement the movement's confrontational mode had yet received.