ISSN: 2241-6692

BLOG - Contemporary Greek Film Cultures

The second Contemporary Greek Film Cultures (CGFC) International Conference took place at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, on the 8th and 9th May 2015, following on the success of the first conference (CGFC 2013, London, 5-6 July), which opened up a space for regular meetings of Greek film scholars from around the world. CGFC 2015 was the first Greek cinema conference in the USA, an important milestone for expanding and strengthening the establishment of the field of Greek Film Studies across the Atlantic, where the study of Greek cinema takes place within the broader framework of Modern Greek Studies or Hellenic Studies programmes.

The Hellenic Studies department within the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies hosted this year’s conference in a bid to strengthen the reach and visibility of Hellenic Studies programmes and research within the institution, nationally and internationally; in addition, this was an attempt to broaden the scope of research activities beyond the established, more traditional, areas of enquiry within the Modern Greek or Hellenic Studies domain to include Greek cinema. The organisers, Dr. Taso Lagos and Dr. Nektaria Klapaki, worked tirelessly throughout the process – from a successful bid to host the conference to the successful delivery of the event – in collaboration with the academic committee[1] chaired by Assoc Prof Vangelis Calotychos (Brown University). ... More


An international conference for the study of Greek Cinema was established last summer. The organisation of Contemporary Greek Film Cultures 2013, which took place at the Hellenic Centre in London on the 5th and 6th July, was a collaboration between doctoral researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Reading, bringing together scholars of contemporary Greek Cinema from Greece, the UK, other European countries and the USA. The aim was to reflect on the recent resurgence of interest in Greek Cinema and to promote the study and theorisation of Greek film internationally. Although there were a number of trends that appeared to dominate the conference, there was a great variety of cross-disciplinary approaches and themes, covering a wide range of the filmography of the contemporary scene.

One of the most prominent trends was the scholarly attention turned to the so called ‘weird wave’ of Greek cinema [i], and specifically to Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) and Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010). Each paper, however, focused on different aspects of the films − a fact that explains the willingness of the organisers to welcome numerous but diverse papers on these two films in the conference. The issues that were addressed concerned identity, language, family, politics and crisis, but also great emphasis was given to the concepts of the national and the transnational. The choice of elaborating on these topics is not coincidental, since these are recurrent themes in Greek cinema overall, and contemporary Greek cinema more specifically; themes that seem to attract great attention by audiences and researchers alike both nationally and internationally.
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