Written and directed by Stergios Dinopoulos and Krysianna B Papadakis, Bearcave is adapted as their feature-film debut from their 38-minute short of the same name, released in 2023. Tackling the entangled stories of two young women in the Greek countryside who are best friends, the filmmaking duo draws from entwined, dichotomous themes of personal change and social stagnancy. The film has enjoyed its world premiere in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori after collecting the top prize in the 2024 Thessaloniki Works in Progress competition.

Local farmer Argyro (Hara Kyriazi) and popular manicurist Anneta (Pamela Oikonomaki) are best friends in a small Greek town, each quietly fighting their own battles around social expectations of women. Anneta, newly pregnant, wants to move to the big city of Larissa – the capital of Thessaly, which has three clubs that are all strip clubs, as the film’s running joke goes – to live in the home of her police-officer boyfriend Giorgos’s parents. The family of Argyro – who has a crush on Anneta – push her to be more like her BFF and are pursued by the biker Mike (Sozos Christou), who takes an interest in Argyro. Meanwhile, Anneta soon realises that her new life is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Broken into chapters and clocking in at over two hours, the film suffers from narrative meandering that is exacerbated by a lack of depth in the connection between its two central figures. At the start of the story, Argyro tries to convince Anneta to visit the titular cave, which holds its own mysterious mythos of bad luck (or maybe the impression of such) – but it’s unclear, for instance, what really compels her to do so. Bearcave flirts with the idea of what a connection between the two women might look like beyond their pursuit for intimacy, but this is ultimately drowned out by the promises of the patriarchal environment and the confines of the sexism around them.

Dinopoulos and Papadakis dabble in some lightly experimental cinematographic (lensing by Arsinoi Pilou) and editing (courtesy of Vagelis Katsaros, Papdakis and Dinopoulos) choices, such as utilising vertical video and intercut shots with different aspect ratios to create an unsettling effect. The duo calls upon the shaky memories and lived fantasies of the two women together to supplement our understanding of the story, even if it feels like it is used too infrequently to make a significant impact. All of this means that Bearcave plays with some interesting visual and thematic ideas, but its overall execution is rapidly revealed to be too scattered to capture the viewer’s attention for its overall running time.

Bearcave is a Greek production staged by Pame Ligo Collective and co-produced by Pucci Productions. Its world sales are up for grabs.