Crisis of sovereignty in recent Greek cinema

Greek cinema is on the rise during a period of deepening economic and political crisis. Films such as Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps have won critical acclaim and awards at international film festivals. They have been produced under increasingly difficult conditions, at a time when funding for social and cultural programmes in Greece is being cut precipitously. What is the relationship between this cinematic resurgence and the crisis? To what extent are these films a response to the troubles that grip the country? This essay relates the depiction of agency in Lanthimos’s and Tsangari’s films to the decline of popular sovereignty in European politics, Greek peripheral modernity and epochal transformations in Greek film culture.