It is unprecedented that two films signed on two Greek filmmakers release the same day. And even more than it is the most worthy of interest within the always plethoric offer on the big screens this Wednesday, April 16. But this curiosity, about the nationality of the author of HarvestAthiná-Recaché Tsangári, and the author of Kyukais secondary and should in no way divert multiple reasons to pay attention to the first feature film by Kostis Charamoutanis.
Discovered during the last Cannes festival at the opening of the ACID selection, Kyuka – Before the end of summer Impression immediately by his way of making alive, singular, imprinted with humor, sweetness and concern about apparently banal moments. Two young people, a boy and a girl who will be learned little by little that they are twins, leave with their father on vacation on a sailboat, are mooring in a port of a Greek island.
Between them, with the silent father and then quick to complain about everything, or on the occasion of meetings on the port or at the beach, are played with small scenes always of an astonishing accuracy, which distill multiple emotions, between comic and mystery. It is only the beginning of a film which will then deploy multiple resources of cinematographic language, around a more ample story and less on the surface of the days that it seemed.
The format and the poor quality of the images evoking the vacation videos of twenty or thirty years ago, but also the dialogues and the assembly help to thwart what each situation seemed to have predictable. This diversity of choices of realization is, among other things, a great way to translate the fact that the characters at the heart of the story are not alone in the world: Kyuka – Before the end of summer is a populated, humanly and formally film.
Several dramas are intertwined in a Gordian knot which concerns the images that each and everyone has self, identity, age and its effects with several eras of existence, the affiliations suffered or wanted, under the sign or not of the family, according to a crescendo staged with an admirable freedom of realization. It is happy and cruel, strange and close.
It takes a kind of audacity quite rare, perhaps partly linked to being a first film, to knead the narrative, visual and sound material, sculpt it in a free manner, in the service of emotions and implicit links, capacities or not of each and everyone to continue to evolve. While rejoicing that Kyuka
found the Roads of the Salles (it was not won in advance), we are already waiting for the second film by Kostis Charamoutanis.
