A mysterious group provides a service to grieving families by impersonating recently deceased relatives.
Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos is part of a recent wave of independent Greek cinema, along with his frequent collaborator Athina Rachel Tsangaris (Attenberg), funding their small budget but unique productions through private means. Lanthimos' bizarre sophomore feature Dogtooth won the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and was shockingly nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Alps continues with its predecessor's absurdist bent, but moves away from the study of behaviorism to darker and more emotional subject matter: the way people cope (or fail to cope) with death. Lanthimos described his new film as the opposite of Dogtooth, in the way that the previous work portrays someone trying to escape a fictional world, whereas Alps features someone attempting to escape the real world via fantasy.
Lanthimos reunites with actors Aggeliki Papoulia and Aris Servetalis, who are joined by French actress Ariane Labed, recently featured in Tsangari's film Attenberg and fairly new to speaking Greek.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it took the award for Best Screenplay.
Running time is approx. 90 minutes.
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