Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.
About the book:
What relates the early films of Yorgos Lanthimos with Vasilis Kekatos’s 2019 Cannes triumph The Distance Between Us and the Sky? What is the lasting legacy of Panos Koutras’s 2009 trans narrative Strella: A Woman’s Way in today’s gender and sexual identity activism in Greece? What was the role of cultural collectives in the formation of a ‘weird history’ of Greek cinema? And how did cinema and other cultural forms respond to a sense of Crisis and an ever expansive management of life that we have now learnt to call biopolitics? This book uses such questions in order to establish a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade in an engaged and highly original manner. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 ‘New’ or ‘Weird Wave’ of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism. At once representing, reframing and reimagining the present, the Greek Weird Wave points to a much larger development in World Cinema.
About the author:
Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou is Associate Professor in Modern Greek and a Fellow of St. Cross College. His research focuses on the ways Modern Greek literature opens a dialogue with other cultural forms (especially Greek popular culture) as well as other literatures and cultures; the other important strand of his research focuses on queer theory, the history of Greek queer cultures, and the difference they can make in people’s lives and social movements.
