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RECETA

Synopsis: 

What would happen if Yorgos Lanthimos, Darek Jarman and Guy Debard were asked to co direct a newstory. Dogtooth's asphyxiating sense of placeness, Garden's visual homo erotic collage and the anti cinematic poetry of situationism are combined in Receta to reframe the experiences of emergency, ruination and guilt of the Greek crisis. Receta takes a highly publicized newstory, the Greek crisis and turns it into an avant guard extravaganza. A circus of marginal anti heroes, trans prostitutes, drug addicts, anarchist dissidents become protagonists of the national drama and are transformed into co authors of queer auto-cinematography. Information in Receta explodes as a form of synethetic alarm, an idiom of decadent pleasure, and a trip into chaos, memory and loss. The tense dialects between dream and social observance is the main aesthetic challenge of the film. This iconography points towards an idiomatic pop art vision of crisis, an reverie in the midsts of chaos. It reads the landscape of the Greek crisis as a disrupted dream scape. Media news, interviews, political ideas (the primary material of reportage) a transformed into a form of visual flanerie. Every scene in the film emphasises overlays, memory trips, hypnotic rhytms which aims to unite social reportage with multiple versions of new wave and avant guard cinema.  

Runtime: 
01:12:00
English subtitle: 
Yes
Information for the Audience: 

RECETA probes the fragmented social and political grand narratives of Greek subjectivities through personal lived experience.  RECETA includes myself as the author/director thematically and visually and as thus fits the above descriptions of an essay film.  I am the one who immerses himself in the experience of filming in Greece (2011 to 2014) and the one who opens and closes the piece as the subject.  Specific examples from my film that substantiate this are: The actor role I play as the monk who opens and closes the film; penetrating the anarchist subcultures of Exarchia with an objective to film what I observe, and my role as a filmmaker mixing presentness with echoes from the past as I travel a disrupted landscape of Greek identity.  The experiences in my film are both real and imagined.   Some are filmed as they occur, others are staged and dramatised to simulate a real or imagined experience.  Still others are taken from decades of my family’s home movies, going back 10, 20 or even 30 or more years.  Because of its more ambiguous subjective practice, it is not entirely divorced from fictional filmmaking and therefore does not easily fit into popular notions of documentary filmmaking.  Likewise, It does not conform to journalistic standards, which demand objectivity and other constraints.  

Categories:

Distribution budget: 
2000 euro
Directed by: 
Michael Mantas
Writing credits: 
Michael Mantas
Cast: 
Mina Orfanou Michael Mantas Dorotea Mercuri
Produced by: 
Michael Mantas
Music by: 
Mikis Theodorakis
Cinematography by: 
Yorgos Bolanos
Film Editing by: 
Marios Zogas
Set Decoration by: 
Bianca Nikolariezi
Costume Design by: 
Bianca Nikolarieze
Makeup Department: 
Yianna Marmataki
Release Date: 
Monday, September 4, 2017
Total votes: 1282

Subtitles: