Athina Rachel Tsangari is an award-winning filmmaker widely considered as a principal instigator of the Greek New Wave. She served as the projections designer and video director producer for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, which won an EMMY for Best Live Broadcast. In 2009, she created the animation work Reflections (in-situ large-scale mapping projections) for the inauguration of the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
She is the founder of Haos Film, a filmmaker-run company based in Athens, Greece. Among Haos’ producing credits are Yorgos Lanthimos’ films Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), and co-producer on Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013). Filmmaker-in-residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, where she also taught as a visiting professor. DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin, while working on her stage directorial debut, Wedekind’s Lulu, commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. Recipient of the 2017 Kunstpreis Berlin in Cinema, awarded by Germany’s Akademie Der Künste.
Her sophomore feature film Attenberg (2010) premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Best Actress Coppa Volpi Award for Ariane Labed, a best female director prize across all Venice IFF sections, and further garnered several Best Film awards worldwide. Chevalier (2015), won Best Film at the BFI-London Film Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Both Attenberg and Chevalier were Greece’s submissions for Best International Film at the Oscars.
She is currently in pre-production on Harvest, a UK-US-German period film for which she was
awarded the Arte Europe Grand Accord.
SIFF will be presenting this year the rarely screened early short film of Tsangari, “Fit” (1994, 8′).
“Fit” explores a new kind of visual and corporeal language, deploying off-beat mise-en-scene, startling gestures and outlandish humor to vividly render the protagonist character’s struggle against her appointed familial, societal and professional role.
