Avranas’ Miss Violence at Venice Festival

The Greek film Miss Violence by Alexandros Avranas is participating  in the 70th International Film Festival of Venice, which started on August 28 and will be completed on September 7.

This is the second feature-length film for the Greek director, who has also created the awarded film, Without, at the Thessaloniki film festival in 2008.

The film is a reference-allegory on Greece’s current situation with the memorandum and the Troika.

In the film, an 11-year-old girl commits suicide on her birthday. The grandfather of this odd family controls and guides all of its members, including the grandmother, his two daughters and his grandchildren, to the extent of engaging in pedophilia and incest and even leading his two daughters to prostitution.

Elements and events are gradually revealed to the audience through studied, rigged, austere scenes, while the camera and the audience remain just an observer of the things happening in a seemingly pious family, but in reality a horrible family, which, just as Greece along with the rest of Europe, is led to breakup.

The actors’ and actresses’ performances are excellent, with those of Themis Panou and Reni Pittaki leading.

Miss Violence is based on a true incident that was recounted to Avranas while he was in Berlin prepping his next cinematic venture; the story of a young girl’s suicide became an immediate priority for the director, who morphed it into his sophomore film. “I was preparing Europa, a film I had already finished the script for,” he recounts, “but then I dropped everything to work on this amazing story I’d just heard.”

“I’m very much interested in what can be called the familial landscape,” the director explained. “It’s a starting point from where you can expand to social and political realities,” he went on, noting that Miss Violence is a very cruel film: “There’s no raw violence,” he said, “but it’s as cruel as the society we live in. It’s about the things you can’t see coming, things you cannot fathom. It’s about the things that blindside you,” as reported in cineuropa.org.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Production companies: Faliro House Productions, Plays2Place Productions
Cast: Themis Panou, Reni Pitakki, Eleni Roussinou, Sissy Toumasi, Kalliopi Zontanou, Konstantinos Athanasiades, Chloe Bolota, Maria Skoula
Director: Alexandros Avranas
Screenwriters: Alexandros Avranas, Kostas Peroulis
Producers: Vasilis Chrysanthopoulos, Alexandros Avranas
Executive producers: Christos V. Konstantakopoulos
Director of photography: Olympia Mytilinaiou
Production designers: Eva Manidaki, Thanassis Demiris
Costume designer: Despina Chimona
Editor: Nikos Helidonides
Sales: Elle Driver
99 minutes.