Park
2016, 94 minutes, Digital
Greece and Poland
Language: In Greek, English, and Danish with English subtitles
Director: Sofia Exarchou
Cast: Dimitris Kitsos, Dimitra Vlagopoulou, and Thomas Bo Larsen (The Hunt, The Celebration)
Screening within our Baltimore Greek Film Festival, which runs Nov. 2–4. Read more about the festival and the other films in the lineup here.
More than ten years on from the summer Olympic Games, the Olympic village in Athens has been colonized by weeds and a group of displaced teenagers. They hang around in the disused training facilities (overgrown swimming pools and sports fields) and the deserted changing rooms and showers. This no man’s land symbolizes the decay of Greece; a malady that has also taken hold of the youth.
The main character is Dimitri, a young man who realizes that there is no future for him in the former Olympic village, but doesn’t know how to get away from it. He gets into a relationship with the former athlete Anna, who had to give up sports after a serious injury and now has few illusions about life.
With a cast of mainly non-professional actors, filmed with a handheld camera in her feature debut, director Sofia Exarchou captures the raw, unguided energy of seemingly hopeless Greek youth. At the same time, this is a sensitive coming-of-age film about one such youth.
“Life changing and universal.”
— Abel Ferrara (dir. Bad Lieutenant)
“The spirit of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark looms large in this spiky Greek drama… a corrosive portrait of a lost generation, an unsettling dystopia that is also a kind of national psychodrama.”
— Lee Marshall, Screen International
“I’ve found it hard to shake Park, gifted newcomer Sofia Exarchou’s piercing, astonishingly rigorous snapshot of impoverished, disaffected Greek youth.”
— Guy Lodge, The Guardian
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