Rising Greek filmmaker Evi Kalogiropoulou will bring his much-anticipated feature debut, “Gorgonà,” to the Venice Film Festival this week. Here is an easy story about a woman who takes on the genre set in the future of the film “Men Dominate.”
Awarded during development at the Rotterdam Film Festival Cinemart and Cannes Cinephondation Atelier, the film won the heels of the director’s lively short film “Highway 65,” which was performed at Cannes in 2021, and the Winnenner Award for “Zerxes” later in the week of Cannes Critics.
Written by Kalogiropoulou and Louise Groult, it is produced by Amanda Livanou for Greece’s Neda film, and co-produced with Bertrand Gore and Nathalie Mesuret, Blue Monday Perrier, Alexandre Perrier, François-Pierre Clavel, and Playtime handles global sales.
“Golgona” takes place in a small, poor city-state ruled by a huge refinery that provides oil. It is a resource that allows its inhabitants to survive like other parts of the world, wrestling with civil unrest and environmental collapse.
The city-state is ruled by gun-hitting, hyper-masculin forces, whose unstable leader Nikos (Christos Lulis), who faces the illness of the terminal, must arrange for his succession. The race to take over him is plagued when he plays “Assassin’s Creed” actor Melisanti Mahuto, including his protégé, Maria, among the candidates. But her fate changes with the sudden arrival of Eleni (Aurora Marion), a sultry singer who plays at a bar in town.
Below is a genderfluid mashup of genre bending, a queer romance, some revenge fantasy that I’m excited about as a child with Kung-Fu, Western, and Blaxploitation Films Kalogiropoulou.
In those films, the filmmaker, a skilled painter and visual artist, says he had a hard time growing up.
“The director has always been a guy, and you could see the stereotypes around this,” she tells Variety. “I was thinking of ways that (the same thing) could be done from a woman’s perspective.” Kalogiropoulou describes “Golgona” as “the fulfillment of that fantasy,” and describes a “love letter” to the film that influenced her.
The film was filmed in Eleusina, a polluted industrial city on the outskirts of Athens, where oil refineries provide a harsh apocalyptic environment for the director’s dystopian universe. The city also retains its importance as an ancient host of Eleusinia’s mystery. There is no little understood pagan ritual centered around the myth of Persephone’s abduction myth through the king of the King, Hades, and the mother Demeter to find her.
These mysteries are celebrations of female strength and provide a stepping stone for Karojiropru’s quest for “patriarchy and environmental destruction,” which prompted her to imagine a desolate future where masculinity is literally toxic.
In “Golgona,” the director draws from the ancient Greek mythology, “the starting point of Western tales.” The title is a reference to the most famous and winged Gorgon, described by the most famous medusa, Karogiropru, as “the ultimate figure of women’s rage and transformation.”
Infusing her interpretation of that figure as a comic book superpower, the director finds the perfect way to tell stories, some genre hybrids, some female empowerment action thrillers. A mere filming of apocalyptic shoots – Greek answer to “Fury Road” – “Golgona” is also a film about love and femininity, with the ability of other women to unleash superpowers. Perhaps even changing the world.
“Through love, I can find something else I’ve never explored before,” says Karogiropru. “Of course there is charm, but it is also the power (discovered) through others. It is also about (your own) love.”
