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FESTIVALS Greece

Wild Duck has Athenian premiere at European Panorama fest

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- Sakaridis’ feature debut is a bleak observation of modern-day Athens’ economic and social woes at the wake of a telecommunications scandal

Wild Duck has Athenian premiere at European Panorama fest

Inspired by the Athens wiretapping scandal of 2005, where the mobile phones of over 100 Greek parliament members, ministers and high-ranking officials were found to be under surveillance, Yannis Sakaridis shies away from true events and steers his feature debut towards the drama of a man struggling with dire financial circumstances.

An expansion of his 2006 short film Truth, Wild Duck [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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follows Dimitris (Alexandros Logothetis) as he is forced to sell out his property in order to finance his debt to a loan shark. Looking for quick cash, he picks up some work from a major cell-phone service carrier and stumbles upon a potentially explosive wiretapping scandal.

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Though the viewer might expect the story to proceed in a plot-driven direction exploring the events the film is inspired by, Sakaridis abruptly drops the political thriller elements, in favour of character study and humanitarian drama motifs. The hero’s discovery is a tapped cell-phone antenna hidden inside an apartment, emanating radiation, which may be directly responsible for the upstairs neighbour falling ill with cancer.

Born out of necessity rather than choice, Sakaridis’ film turned out to be a sociological character study due to lack of means: “We started out to make a political thriller based on the true story,” said Sakaridis at the film’s premiere at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival last November, explaining that “in order to go there, we needed financial and political backing that we wouldn’t be able to obtain.”

Relying heavily on a fragmented timeline, Sakaridis’ attempts to create a sense of psychological suspense which underlines his search for the mechanics of his hero’s implication, guilt and fear, as he is torn between revealing the company’s mischief and move onto a new life, or keeping his mouth shut and his pockets full, perpetuating a corrupt state of affairs that brought the nation to its knees in the first place.

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