Knifer

Yiannis Economides’ vision is of spiritual, moral and cultural destitution and degraded human relations but you’ll have to ask him if he’s making a point about contemporary Greek reality or whether he’s saying something about the state of European civilisation or civilisation generally and so on. Whatever, the Cypriot film-maker’s third release, Knifer (Μαχαιροβγάλτης) – above, in full, with English subtitles – is a brilliant and deeply uncomfortable film noir.

And here is a piece in English on Economides, in which he describes himself as a ‘a peasant’ and ‘a bit of a punk’.

Yiannis Economides: looking into the face of Greece

I hope by now you’ve all watched Yiannis Economides’ Knifer and maybe even Spirtoukouto, available here in full with English subtitles. In my post on Knifer, I wondered whether Economides, whose films are characterised by moral and cultural decay, was trying to make a point about Greece or about Europe or civilisation in general. Well, in the above clip, we get the answer; because Economides says he is only interested in Greece and Greeks, or the modern face of Greece, as he puts it. Indeed, in this excellent ERT interview (in Greek) with the Cypriot film-maker, Economides, expands on this and describes himself as a ‘patriot’, in the sense that he had opportunities to study and work abroad but consciously decided to stay in Greece because he says, from a young age, and almost driven by fate, he wanted to understand Greece and then speak about what he had found out.