GIFFT 2024 – REVIEW OF LISTEN AND LISTEN TO WHO’S TALKING

 Reviewed by James Karas 

The Greek International Film Festival Tour (GIFFT) is back for the month of October 2024 featuring a wide range of films, shorts and documentaries. They are all shown in 11 cities across Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa in cinemas or online. The Festival shows a feat of organization that few can match let alone surpass. It all originated with Stan Papulkas who has found dozens of sponsors, volunteers and venues to be able to state that it is the only Festival of its kind in Canada.   

 I saw two feature-length films and my reviews follow.

                                                            LISTEN

Listen is about Valmira (Efthalia Papacosta), a pretty 16-year who became deaf when she was a child. Her mother died around the same time and her father Stamos (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos) married Tania (Yoana Bukovska-Davidova), a Bulgarian woman who has a son Aris (Dimitris Kitsos). Financial issues force the family to move from Athens to their derelict village on an island. Valmira attended a school for the deaf in Athens but in the village, she is forced to attend the local high school.

 

The drama centres around Valmira, the students at her school and her dysfunctional family. At school Valmira faces bigotry, abuse and alienation from students who find her deafness as something to ridicule and to treat her abominably. She tries dancing and playing soccer with the students (she is good at both) but they look at her as a lesser human being. She shows considerable strength but she is crushed by the cruelty that she encounters. Papacosta has an attractive face that registers emotion and pain beautifully. A superb performance.

Most of her classmates are plain goons and a disgusting sight. She does find Mario (Nikos Koukas), an apparently decent student and they fall in love. The bigotry of the students spreads to Aris, the Bulgarian, and the atmosphere of ridicule and cruelty spreads.

Stamos and Tania do not get along and Aris gets in a fist fight with Mario and Aris is expelled from the school based on Mario’s and Valmira’s lies.  The picture of bigotry is completed with the conduct of the school’s Director (Evangelia Andreadaki) who is mostly concerned with keeping her job rather than upholding fairness and integrity.

The film is shot in the  derelict village, the beautiful coast, the school and Valmira’s house. Director and writer Maria Douza overdoes the cruelty of the students and in general. Almost no one is untouched with the bigotry and cruelty inherent in the situation. Nevertheless, it is a moving film.

                             LISTEN TO WHO’S TALKING

Listen To Who’s Talking is a film by Thodoris Niarchos (his first) that manages to get some laughs but its thin plot carries it only so far before it slows down to a walk when it should be galloping. The level of laughter should be increasing but it does not. 

It looks like a low budget production with scenes in the protagonist’s bedroom and office and the bakery where the heroine works. There are a few outdoor scenes of relative insignificance.

Fotis (Ilias Meletis) is a Life Coach in Athens and doing financially just fine but he realizes that he has no life. To be precise, he is told by his Voice (his subconscious his Spirit?) telling him to straighten out his life. He has no friends, no family and lives with a dog.

We see him in his office seeing some wacky people. He calls them clients and not patients because he is not qualified to practice anything but what he learned from life. One of them is a priest who is troubled by his failing faith and his habit of drinking the leftover communion wine after the Sunday service. As much as a bottle of of it. Another client is middle-aged man who coaches a team of attractive volleyball girls. The girls are butt-endowed and the coach finds that part of their anatomy extremely attractive - a bit too attractive. Fotis advise him to practice self-control.

Another client is a soccer game official whose whistle is blown in favour of the team that helps him live well by working only two days a week. The technical word for that is bribery. His clients find Fotis’s advice wise and helpful. But we know that he is working too hard and missing out on life.

In the meantime, the Voice tells him to stop working so hard and find a woman. Fotis tries to follow that advice and finds his clients ridiculous, laughs in their face and they abandon him. He finds a woman, Chrysanthi (Xanthi Georgiou), who serves him pastry every morning in the local bakery but he has never looked at her for some 200 days. When he does open his eyes and sees her, she turns out to be attractive, personable and smart. She has friends who are coaching her to get a life so that she and Fotis have that in common as well.

Fotis the Life Coach turns into a bowl of jelly at the thought of asking Chrysanthi for a date. He becomes nervous, uncertain, reluctant, in fact he acts like a nerdy teenager approaching a girl for the first time. Really?  The two actors do a fine job despite the limitations of the script and there is considerable laughter generated.
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Listen and Listen to Who’s Talking are shown as part of the 2024 Greek International Film Festival Tour in Toronto and cities across Canada. The Festival runs from October 1 to 31, 2024.   For more information about GIFFT and the films shown visit www.gifft.ca

 James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press