Contemporary Greek cinema after the financial crash: investigating style, form and the (trans)national debate.

Abstract

Introduction: The topic of this dissertation, as the title suggests, is to focus on a recent trend in contemporary Greek cinema following the world wide economic crash from 2008 onwards. Greece, during this time, has seen record levels of unemployment and national debt, as well as a political framework verging on the brink of collapse. However, countering this is an emerging trend of new filmmaker's whose work has grown out of the recession, what is now commonly referred to as the 'Weird wave of Greek cinema' (Papadimitriou 2014, p.3). This dissertation attempts to investigate the weird wave's national and transnational dimension. By using a selection of recent examples, a study of the family in contemporary Greek and European cinema will compliment the formers findings, which, as shall be shown, becomes one of the clearest ways ideas around the national and the transnational can be investigated. This dissertation doesn't make a clear decision on whether these films are purely national or transnational; it is more about the way these films, from an ideological standpoint, interact with the local and the global, and how it effects this contemporary moment in Greek culture and society.