Park
Description
In the years since the 2004 Athens Olympics, the formerly grand stadiums and swimming pools have become modern-day Greek ruins. Where top athletes once competed, the disaffected kids who’ve come of age since the Games run wild, living by their own rules thanks to checked-out parents and a bankrupt society incapable of guiding them toward any semblance of a hopeful future. The closest thing the compelling, sometimes disturbing Park has to a lead character is older teenager Dimitri (Dimitris Kitsos), who fumbles through a romance with one of the few girls in his circle and is something of a mentor to one of the younger boys. He soon learns, though, that there is no reward in store, even for what passes as good behavior. Park‘s loose, youth-driven narrative and raucous cast of mostly amateur actors call to mind films like Kids and Gummo, but with an added layer of bleakness that suggests this shiftless crew isn’t an isolated community, but rather a symbol of an entire generation caught in a dystopia they had no hand in creating. –Cheryl Eddy
Trailer
Biographies
Sofia Exarchou is a native of Athens, Greece, whose previous work includes the shorts Apostasi (2006) and Mesecina (2009). Park, her feature debut, won the New Directors Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Of the film she says, “When I started writing the script, there was no high narration or big drive for the kids. I did this because I wanted to be honest about their reality, the fact that when you live in a place like this it’s very rare to have any big dreams. I didn’t want to build a mainstream narrative where the protagonist dreams of doing something with their life; the protagonist’s biggest dream is just to escape this place. I wanted the audience to try and inhabit this psychological place during each moment of the film.”