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PRODUCTION Greece

Steve Krikris enters post-production with his feature debut, The Waiter

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- The Greek director has finished shooting his long-term project, which ventures into neo-noir and existential mystery territory

Steve Krikris enters post-production with his feature debut, The Waiter
Aris Servetalis and Yiannis Stankoglou in The Waiter

Steve Krikris has been fairly active in many fields of the Greek film industry – having been a producer, scriptwriter, stage and TV advert director, plus actor – and he has also been busy in his role as artistic director and co-organiser of the International Film Festival of Patmos. Since he dedicates so much time to different professions, he has been working on and off, for the past seven years, on his debut feature-length film, The Waiter [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, which has just wrapped shooting.

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Renos (Aris Servetalis) works as a waiter. He is in his late forties and lives alone in an apartment building in downtown Athens. He is a peculiar, introverted kind of person. He resembles an Albert Camus protagonist: detached, almost autistic, living in his own private world. In his spare time, Renos likes painting small still lifes. He also enjoys reading and taking care of his plants. His everyday life is characterised by a repetitious routine. Yet fate has an unexpected turning point in store for this lonely man. Will he be able to deal with it and follow through?

Krikris, who also wrote and co-produced the film, describes The Waiter as a neo-noir or an existential mystery story. He also lifts the lid on the influence behind the script: “While living in New York, in the late 1980s, my next-door neighbour was murdered, and I got a glimpse of the murderer himself. Many years later, coming back to this experience, I decided to write a screenplay where gradually the true events became the excuse for creating a murder story that is also – and primarily – a study of a fictional character. I wanted to create a micro world out of all the sensual elements and to focus on details that I later realised played a significant role.”

The production process advanced very slowly, as The Waiter was pre-approved in late 2014 by the Greek Film Centre and ERT, but further financing for the low-budget film was quite hard to secure. According to the director, a lot of adjustments had to be made to the shoot owing to budget restrictions, but thanks to the production team and the cast, the film was shot over a total of five weeks. 

The Waiter is a Greek co-production by Filmiki2|35 and Steve Krikris, and it is being supported by the Greek Film Centre and ERT SA. The film is now at the post-production stage, in the hope of reaching the festival circuit at the beginning of 2018.

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