{"id":90327,"date":"2025-02-27T14:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T13:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/?page_id=90327"},"modified":"2025-03-24T15:07:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T14:07:01","slug":"position-athina-rachel-tsangari","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/position-athina-rachel-tsangari\/","title":{"rendered":"| Position |\u00a0Athina Rachel Tsangari |"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diagonale 2025 is dedicating a comprehensive retrospekctive<\/a> to director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari, presenting Tsangari’s complete oeuvre in Austria for the first time. She will also receive a Carte Blanche<\/em> and has chosen Nikos Papataki’s surreal class satire The Shepherds of Calamity<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

| Panel |
\n<\/strong>The different strategies of European co-production from the perspective of Greece and Austria<\/strong>
\nSat March 29, 4 p.m.
\nForum at Heimatsaal
\nMore information \u2192 here<\/a><\/p>\n

| Nachspann EXTRA |
\n<\/strong>Masterclass with Athina Rachel Tsangari
\nSun March 30,\u00a0 2.45 p.m.
\nSchubertkino 1
\nMore information \u2192 here<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
The Films:<\/strong><\/h6>\n

Fit<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR 1994, 8 min<\/span><\/p>\n

Attenberg<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR 2010, 35mm, 97 min<\/p>\n

The Slow Business of Going<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR\/US 2000, 101 min<\/p>\n

The Capsule<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR 2012, 35 min<\/span><\/p>\n

24 Frames Per Century<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR 2013, 3 min<\/span><\/p>\n

Chevalier<\/strong><\/a>
\nGR 2015, 104 min<\/p>\n

After Before<\/strong><\/a>*
\nUS\/GR 2016, 31 min<\/span><\/p>\n

Lulu-Trailer (Wedekind)<\/strong><\/a>
\n2017, 5 min<\/span><\/p>\n

Harvest<\/strong><\/a>
\nUK\/DE\/GR\/FR\/US 2024, 131 min<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* Thank you to The Criterion Collection<\/p>\n

xxx<\/pre>\n
COURAGEOUS AND FEARLESS FILMMAKING<\/strong>
\nBy Yun-hua Chen<\/p>\n
Like the title of Athina Rachel Tsangari\u2019s debut feature, The Slow Business of Going<\/strong><\/em>, her filmmaking pace is also a slow business of filming. With the exception of Chevalier<\/strong><\/em> (2015), which arrived only five years after Attenberg<\/strong><\/em> (2010), she releases a feature film roughly every decade. In the intervals, she explores other creative avenues, crafting short films and TV series, including two episodes of the popular show Upload<\/em> (2022). Her heartfelt connection to carefully selected projects and this sense of unhurriedness permeate her body of work: in Attenberg<\/em>, human intimacy takes time to learn; in The Capsule<\/strong><\/em> (2012), prolonged training is required to mature into womanhood; and in Chevalier<\/em> and Harvest<\/strong><\/em> (2024), it takes a journey\u2014or even arson\u2014to uncover the true nature of one\u2019s travel companions or neighbors<\/p>\n
Much like the protagonist in The Slow Business of Going<\/em>\u2014a woman who travels the world with a rocking chair\u2014Tsangari\u2019s characters navigate life with raw curiosity and childlike inquisitiveness. In The Capsule<\/em>, they learn to become women; in Attenberg<\/em>, Marina learns how to kiss with tongues; and in Harves<\/em>t, Walter opens his eyes to the arrival of modernity and capitalism. Their unfiltered rawness becomes a lens for examining the genesis of human nature while critiquing the infantilization imposed by patriarchal societal structures that patronize and mansplain. With clarity unclouded by convention, Tsangari\u2019s enfant-sauvage-like adults expose human interaction in its most unvarnished form. They inhabit surreal (or surreally real) settings, each serving as a rite of passage: waiting chambers for reckoning with misfitting identities, facing the loved one\u2019s death, entering womanhood, proving their worth in a \u201cbest of us\u201d contest, or abandoning a deceptively egalitarian farm.<\/p>\n
\"Athina
Athina Rachel Tsangari \u00a9 Stadtkino Filmverleih<\/p><\/div>\n
In these human experiments of maturation, the spaces are confined: a remote seaside town overshadowed by a decaying factory, the tight quarters of a boat, or a secluded village bound by its insular community. These settings, transforming into chamber plays with no exits, reflect the inner disconnections of Tsangari\u2019s characters, who, like creatures observed in an aquarium, are detached from societal entanglements and reduced to their primal emotional cores. Their seemingly puzzling behavior\u2014performing quirky dances, donning a red rooster costume, or rolling shoulder blades like wings\u2014may initially appear bizarre. Yet, these acts wordlessly and without music reveal the uncanny rapproachment between humans and animals. Here, animality becomes central. Tsangari\u2019s characters mimic David Attenborough\u2019s documentaries or engage in animalistic choreography\u2014it is by embodying non-human forms that their humanity shines even brighter, and through an examination of outward behavior that their innermost psyches are laid bare.<\/p>\n
What appears absurd and grostesque is, in fact, the essence of what is genuine and authentic. Tsangari\u2019s distinctive use of unconventional songs and the distortion of human bodies slides into a metaphor for human interaction\u2014a game, a struggle, a violent negotiation. The camera acts as a witness to this violence, recording both the physical and emotional sensations. In her exploration of awkwardness, which simultaneously exposes and mocks societal hypocrisy, Tsangari evokes a cold sensuality in bodies and minds that refuse to conform. This distinct approach has often linked her to the so-called \u201cGreek Weird Wave,\u201d a term that fails to fully capture the nuances of Greek cinema in the first decade of the century. What might appear \u201cweird\u201d is, at its heart, a cry of frustration\u2014an irreconcilable conflict between the yearning to love a place and the impossibility of truly doing so. This dissonance reflects the experience of being trapped in a society that is sinking deeper into financial crisis, identity struggles, and social unrest. Time passes, normalizing injustices rooted in structural corruption and deeply-ingrained nepotism, leaving individuals powerless to effect political or socioeconomic change. Tsangari\u2019s settings thus resemble \u201cany-space-whatever\u201d\u2014ruined yet still inhabited. In these spaces, her seemingly eccentric characters are not eccentric because they misunderstand the world, but rather, because they grasp the world\u2019s realities all too clearly and find themselves in profound discord with them.<\/p>\n
In Tsangari\u2019s latest work, Harvest<\/em>, the act of map-drawing precipitates the village\u2019s downfall. The map, drawn for the purpose of usurpation, mirrors the knowledge of sexuality in Attenberg<\/em> and the awareness of womanhood in The Capsule<\/em>. Naming and mapping things as they truly are becomes a merciless revelation\u2014a knowledge that shatters the comfortable cocoon. A dangerous act, yet one that artists like Tsangari boldly and unflinchingly embrace.<\/p>\n
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Diagonale 2025 is dedicating a comprehensive retrospekctive to director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari, presenting Tsangari’s complete oeuvre in Austria for the first time. She will also receive a Carte Blanche and has chosen Nikos Papataki’s surreal class satire The Shepherds of Calamity.   | Panel | The different strategies of European co-production from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-90327","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/90327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/90327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diagonale.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}