March 8th: ATTENBERG (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

A young woman in a small coastal town planning for the death of her terminally ill father receives strange lessons in sexual etiquette from her best friend.

Athina Rachel Tsangari was born and raised in Athens, Greece, and attended the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, then the film program at the University of Texas in Austin. She became involved with the local film scene, including an appearance in Richard Linklater's debut film Slacker, and made various short films before her debut feature The Slow Business of Going in 2000.

Returning to Greece, she worked on the team that designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and soon became an instrumental figure in what would loosely be known as a Greek New Wave or Greek "Weird" Wave. She produced the first three feature films of the director Yorgos Lanthimos, culminating in a surprise Oscar nomination in the foreign film category for the 2007 film Dogtooth.

For her return to feature filmmaking, Tsangari had several influences: the desire to write about an unconventional (particularly in Greek culture) father-daughter relationship, and her feeling of being a foreigner in her own country after being gone for over 10 years. She chose to set the story in a place she had spend time in as a child, a former factory town now in underpopulated ruins, mirroring the entropy of the father character.

The cast is headed by Ariane Labed, a French stage actress and former dancer who, despite co-founding a  theatre company in Athens, was not fluent in Greek. Tsangari elected to cast her in her debut film role, and worked with her on her phonetic pronunciation of the dialogue more than its literal translation, as well as specific body language for her character. Also acting in the film is Tsangari's director friend Lanthimos, veteran actor Vangelis Mourikis, and Evangelia Randou (Lanthimos's Kinetta).

Behind the camera was Lanthimos's trusted cinematographer Thimos Bakatakis. Much like the David Attenborough nature documentaries that gives the film its bastardized title, Tsangari shoots much of her scenes at a clinical remove, also complementing the mechanical delivery of the dialogue.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Labed won the award for Best Actress. It received a Grand Jury special mention at the AFI Film Festival, Best Director at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, and at Greece's Hellenic Film Academy Awards received nominations for Best Film, Direction, Actress and Screenplay, with Labed winning again.

Running time is approx. 90 minutes.