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LECCE 2013 Competition

11 Meetings With My Father and strange blood relations

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- The film by Greek director Nikos Kornilios, in competition at the 14th European film festival in Lecce, tells the story of a woman who finally meets her father

Imagine you are twenty, you have never met your father and one day, you decide to go looking for him. What happens if the person you find is the opposite of what you had expected? This is the basis of 11 Meetings With My Father, Athenian director Nikos Kornilios’ sixth feature film, presented in competition at the Lecce European film festival (8-13 April). A delicate film which poses questions on blood ties through Eva and Thomas’ story (Eva Galogavrou and Lambros Apostolou - photo). The father and daughter meet for the first time and do not know whether to love or hate one another, whether to meet again or whether to return to their former existence when they had not met.

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Eva is a young and beautiful woman, studying to be a lyrical singer, who goes everywhere on her bicycle. One day, she decides to go looking for her father, whom she has never met and who does not know of her existence. She finds him in a lorry depot, where he, Thomas, works as a guard, living in a messy container. Eva’s mother, a beautiful and refined Nordic woman met Thomas twenty years earlier when she was young and robust and decided to have a child with him, without telling him. Today though, he is fat, scruffy and unhappy. The meeting between father and daughter will be one between two different worlds which will give life to a strange relationship, as illogical as it is necessary and instinctive.

In the course of eleven encounters, the two main characters scrutinise each other, become suspicious of each other (the encounters include one DNA test), but they also seek each other out, talk, fight, and find each other again. The screenplay, written by the director, together with Evgenia Papageorgiou, meticulously traces two characters who decide to walk next to one another for a while. Eva is painted as a determined, independent woman whose father’s absence has still managed to leave a few traces however (as seen through her relationship with her boyfriend, who is sweet and caring but whom she cannot bring herself to love). Thomas is depressed, has no aspirations and suffers from other voids: he has another, younger daughter whose mother no longer lets him see. We do not know why, but that is not important.

The ending remains open. We do not know whether the two will meet again, or whether they will lose each other forever. Eva launches herself into her new life, with her talent and her beautiful hair. Who knows whether she will be happy. If nothing else, at least now she knows where she comes from. 

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(Translated from Italian)

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