Mania

Director:  Giorgos Panousopoulos
Cast: Alessandra Vanzi, Aris Retsos, Antonis Theodorakopoulos, Stavros Xenidis
Greece, 1985, DCP, 92’, color
Greek with Turkish and English subtitles   

It’s one of those impossibly scorching hot days of early summer, when the heat beats down on humanity so relentlessly that anything can happen. 30-year-old Sophie is married with two children and works at a multinational IT company as a program’s analyst. She has just found out that she’s the only female chosen to attend a special educational program in the US because of her square logic. What she doesn’t know is that her memories and her primal instincts affect her subconsciousness, her work and her entire identity in ways she cannot control.

That same afternoon, at the National Gardens, a series of events cause her to fall prey to those dark inner forces, gradually losing all sense of identity and running away, like a hunted animal, while her husband makes a desperate attempt to save her and their daughter. After A Foolish Love, Panoussopoulos returns with a film that’s an open dialogue with Euripides’ Bacchae, a retelling of the tragedy through a contemporary point of view, where the new tech-crazed reality openly clashes with deep-rooted pagan fury. Like a rampant bacchanalian goddess, the main character casts social restraints aside, embodying the ancient struggle between the earthbound and the metaphysical, the instinctual and the rational.