This film has two great flaws: lack of a central plot and dispassionate characters (not performances). The protagonist of Marina is not only asexual, she is completely unemotional, even around her father and her supposed best (and only) friend. There is neither joy nor tragedy, only complete indifference to everything that happens. Occasionally you get an interesting remark about how Greece skipped modernity, but that is not really enough to make it interesting or thoughtful. Even during her sex scene, Marina keeps talking trivia non-stop during the first half, then is quiet as a mouse during the second half. I have never met or even seen people this deprived of emotion, so I cannot relate in any meaningful way to it.In short, this is the kind of film that most people will get bored with quickly, then get told by somebody else why they are supposed to like it. Symbolism really only works when it is sufficiently obvious to all. In my opinion, this should never have been nominated for any awards, much less won them. If you know somebody that stares blankly with no emotion when he/she is with friends, having sex, and when their father dies, then maybe you can relate to this film more than I did. If you don't, well, there are much better Greek films out there.

If there is any one character that this movie really pushes one to identify with, it must be Spyros. The dying man is there for the ride, and so are we, the ones unfortunate enough to have sat throughout this static disjointed mess. Tsangari manages to pull a sick joke on viewers by pretending that this movie is about "sex, death and life in between". This movie is a preposterously pretentious collage of thoroughly insipid scenes, fit for a post-lobotomy day-long blank staring session. I found the movie utterly unenjoyable, and its parallel to real-life documentaries revolting and absurd, seeing as how Attenborough manages to be a lot closer to his animals than this confounded director ever was to her actors. Tsangari is so adept at chasing the last traces of sincere expression out of the actors' performances that I feel like there was more humanity and life in the few shots of gorillas than there was from the entire cast of this excruciatingly dry film. The only memorable thing about this movie is how many yawns one could squeeze into 90 minutes. If you want a good (and recent) piece of Greek cinema, try Kynodontas (incidentally, Tsangari was an associate producer of that film, but hew role was probably small enough not to ruin what is a masterpiece of modern Greek cinema, unlike this unpalatable bunk).

Difficult. That's what cult stands for in this situation. Greece's highest creations come from a group of people where they recycle and create via a type of rotation. The producer of Dogtooth become a director, the director an actor and so on. Not bad at all. Follows the artistic aspect of Dogtooth, showing a story on adulthood and dealing with loss and what you are. An unconventional human being (with a touch of Asperger's syndrome), a loving and caring father, a slutty best friend and a partner almost like an alter ego, resembles to her father, and mirrors herself. Honest, familiar yet artsy, method-ish and pretentious from time to time. But still opens up to the viewers, where the twisted is welcome, no one judges and offers himself to the public effortlessly, honestly almost unconditionally. A new era, post modern, unlocks the contemporary social establishment.

I'd heard nothing about ATTENBERG until I picked up a review booklet in the local indie cinema in my town and was intrigued by the premise. It's difficult to explain the story as such because this isn't really a story piece, but more of a study in character and relationships, and the human condition.As a character study the film-makers perhaps deliberately draw parallels with nature documentaries which observe animal behaviour without really making any emotional connection between man and beast. The film draws attention to this - as the main character Marina, played here by Ariana Labed, watches Sir David Attenborough on TV describing his experience of coming face to face with a gorilla. He sees it as a connection with nature like no other he has experienced. Marina herself realises that there is no emotional content in her life, no connection with those around her. Her candid questioning of her father's sexuality and the off-hand conversation about the process of cremation after his death lays bare the emotional desert that she exists in. Her cold relationship with best friend Bella, and Bella's clumsy attempts to set alight the fires of sexual yearning in Marina further show that she (Marina) is spiritually, emotionally empty.Even her attempts - ultimately successful - to lose her virginity to the nameless engineer she drives to and from work each day in her job as a taxi driver are emotionless, cold, stark. She describes each stage of their tenderness, each aspect of love-making stripping it of any feeling, warmth, humanity.Marina is played brilliantly by Ariana Labed, who hides behind a stillness in both her face and eyes, barely revealing anything except in the strange dances with Bella. Evangelia Randou succeeds in bringing darkness to Bella. She is unhindered by thoughts of feeling and emotion, tenderness and love and in every respect she plays the darker, animalistic side to Marina. It was easy to think for the first act that Bella was not a real character but a shadow side to Marina, satisfying the hidden fantasises Marina has, about sex and even, in a Freudian twist, about her own father.Marina almost gets there but the death of her father, the functional process of packing him off to Germany to be cremated (cremation is legal in Greece and has been since 2006, but is still frowned upon by the Orthodox Christian church there) pulls her back into a world that is hard and cold and stark. She stands and watches his coffin packaged, x-rayed for the flight, marked with "THIS WAY UP" stickers like some Amazon or eBay parcel. There is a moment of feeling as she chases briefly after the pick up that takes him to the plane but in the end the film pulls back from allowing the character the emotional epiphany it has been building to. She scatters his ashes into the sea, driven there by Bella, clothed in a functional visibility jacket and struggling to prise off the lid from the urn. There seems to be no feeling, except maybe disappointment that there is no deeper feeling as the waves wash him away. Marina has not opened the door to love, feeling, loss, emotion.And it's this that I struggled with in the film. What it said to me was that humans can be really no different from animals, going through the day by day business of survival. It shows people in all their functional purpose - working, eating, dying. It doesn't hold back from showing it's characters naked, like the apes in the jungle. There is a notion in this that we have a reservoir of compassion and love, and a whole glut of deeper emotions to give but that it remains untapped; and that we are perhaps trapped by our circumstance and surroundings and past and thus prevented from expressing our true selves. Our characters live in a rundown industrial town, and the story itself was written against the backdrop of riots in Greece at austerity measures and economic crisis. The film-makers and writers are asking: Is this all we are? Industry? Economy? Money? Simple black and white things? Or is there something else.But they never answer the question for Marina and her plight is left unresolved, unsatisfied.The cinematography in the film - by Thimios Bakatakis - is beautiful, still. It is a series of tableau into which movement sometimes intrudes, the emotions stirring the mind. But ultimately it is the failure to resolve Marina's dilemma that leaves the film missing that final piece of the jigsaw that would have made it an art-house classic.