The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host An Evening with Athina Rachel Tsangari on Thursday, September 17, including a conversation and double feature of Attenberg and The Slow Business of Going. Greek writer-director Tsangari was recently selected as the 2015 Filmmaker in Residence for the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival, a program co-created and sponsored by Jaeger-LeCoultre.

The dynamic and fearless filmmaker, at the crest of a new Greek wave in cinema, made her entrance into cinema through a happy accident while studying film in Austin, Texas—with a small role in Richard Linklater’s landmark 1991 film, Slacker. Her relationship with Linklater continued when she served as co-producer and actress in 2013’s Before Midnight. The Film Society is thrilled to welcome Tsangari for a conversation about her career, during which she will introduce and discuss her widely lauded, one-of-a-kind sophomore feature Attenberg, a New Directors/New Films selection in 2011. The conversation will be followed by a screening of her rarely seen The Slow Business of Going, a lo-fi sci-fi road movie listed in the 2002 Village Voice Critics’ Poll as one of the year’s “best first films.” It was her MFA thesis feature at the University of Texas at Austin.

Now in its third year, the annual Filmmaker in Residence initiative offers a residency in New York during the festival to a notable independent director, with past participants including Lisandro Alonso (2014) and Andrea Arnold (2013). During her residency in NY starting next month, Tsangari will be working on a screwball action-thriller called White Knuckles. Her most recent feature, Chevalier, a buddy comedy that takes place on a luxury yacht astray on the Aegean Sea, recently had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and will also be screening at the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Tickets to An Evening with Athina Rachel Tsangari are now on sale. The evening is occurring thanks in part to the support of the Harvard Film Archive.

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The Slow Business of Going

Attenberg
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2010, 35mm, 95m
Greek and French with English subtitles
In its irreverent use of (new) Nouvelle Vague, musical, melodrama, and nature documentary, Attenberg symbolically visualizes a change in generation and perspective as a father and daughter gently negotiate their individual rites of passage. The film follows a visionary architect who has come home to die in the vanishing industrial town that is his legacy to his daughter. Meanwhile, his daughter (played by Ariane Labed, in a performance that won her the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival) is exploring the mysteries of kissing with her girlfriend, and the beyond with a visiting engineer. Tsangari’s film—with a soundtrack featuring Françoise Hardy and Suicide—is poised between sincerity and hilarity, tradition and experimentation. A New Directors/New Films 2011 selection.
Thursday, September 17, 6:30pm (Q&A with Athina Rachel Tsangari)

Followed by:

The Slow Business of Going
Athina Rachel Tsangari, USA/Greece, 2001, 35mm, 101m
William Gibson meets Samuel Beckett in Tsangari’s feature directorial debut, an exhilarating, shape-shifting work set mostly in the indeterminate spaces of hotel rooms and aboard a barge in Texas, as Global Nomad Project representative Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez) travels the world, generating and transmitting memories back to the Experience Data Agency. Audaciously stylized and charming in its singular brand of lo-fi sci-fi, The Slow Business of Going radically changes forms (and, frequently, formats) with each strange situation Petra finds herself in. The result is a fast and funny ode to life without a home base and a stimulating exploration of human consciousness between the real and the virtual.
Thursday, September 17, 9:00pm (Introduction by Athina Rachel Tsangari)