Kenan Akkawi

Having been recently discharged from rehab, 26-year-old Phoebe takes her young son on a road trip that will determine their future.

A random explosion connects three stories, where strangers are trying to find some way to live on the edge of legality.

Director’s statement: “Electra is in her early 30s, living in Athens today. She is an artist, but she makes a living working as a babysitter. She is an activist and her boyfriend is a political prisoner. She feels lonely and is struggling to find her place in the world. We follow her as she meets the most important people in her life. Through these meetings, we understand better not only Electra, but also a whole generation of young people who feel stifled in this world. Capitalism, consumerism, globalization are currently being cast into doubt, so I needed to make a film that addresses all these things. What I’m interested in is showing how they affect our everyday life, our small decisions, our intimate relationships.”

Constantina Voulgaris’s first feature film is a delightful anomaly in contemporary cinema, sort of like a Cat Power song. Raw, earnest, melancholy, awkward in parts, razor sharp in others, it's lyrical, yet with an undercutting touch of offbeat humor. And more than anything it's unapologetically a girl's bedroom song, an utterly sincere home movie. Made with the ever-generous currency of a cast and crew of friends, and the ample downtime that Greek summer-in-the-city affords, when everybody else is sunning and hooking up out in the islands, it's a film about two exiles -- in Athens, in summer, in love. A sentimental dance between a girl and a boy who could be stuck in downtown any-ville, yearning to be with each other but too cool to dare, too chicken to admit it, too clumsy not to step on each other's Doc Martens, and too damn sentimental not to surrender, in the end, to that old-fashioned thing called love.

This is not an easy mystery to solve in all its subtleties. In the last paragraph, I give my take on the characters. I won't give away the principal spoiler. Still, if you want to exercise your Sherlock skills to the fullest, skip that last paragraph. I'll warn you. A man leaves prison. He has been paroled. The best he can do at first is stay at a shelter for poor people and look for work. In the meantime he tries to reconnect with people he knows and to avoid the attention of several shady individuals that know him. That's the layout. The mystery elements arise from the fact that he is rejected by a few, pursued by a duo of suspicious looking men, and approached by a bunch of unsavory roughnecks that know him well. Why the rejection? Why the persecution? What is the gang about? The film is parsimonious about handing out hints and clues that we need to answer those questions. The best we can do is work out hypotheses and see if they pan out at the end.

Summer in an Athenian neighborhood, the alarm of a car does not leave their neighbors in peace. But every one has its own problems. Infidelity, robbery, jealousy, flirtation, and family reconciliation on corpses, all pour forth into five intertwined stories

In the confined space of a typical school bus, two contrasting characters share an ordinary day on the road just before Christmas.

Everyone carries something, some burden that weighs him down. Some are crushed, others are freed, others just carry on. Eleven characters cross each others paths, unveiling their fears and desires, during the world weightlifting championship