Directed by Nico Papatakis

Startling, subversive, and explosively controversial, the films of Ethiopian-born Greek iconoclast Nico Papatakis have long been frustratingly hard to see, but they constitute one of the most radical and neglected bodies of work in all of European cinema. A man of the world who rubbed shoulders with Jean Genet and John Cassavetes (he produced the former’s UN CHANT D’AMOUR and the latter’s SHADOWS), Papatakis began his directing career with the incendiary call to class warfare LES ABYSSES, which nearly provoked a riot when it premiered at Cannes in 1963. The scandal was merely a warm-up for a career that courted controversy at every turn and which includes the deliriously surreal romantic tragedy THE SHEPHERDS OF CALAMITY and the shocking Algerian War parable GLORIA MUNDI, a film so inflammatory it could not be shown in Paris for three decades. With their expressionistically heightened style and transgressive themes, Papatakis’s films have served as a major inspiration for the so-called “Weird Wave” of contemporary Greek filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, who carry on the cinematic rebellion that he launched.