<\/p>\n
Rising Greek filmmaker Evi Kalogiropoulou brings her long-awaited feature debut, \u201cGorgon\u00e0,\u201d\u00a0to the Venice Film Festival this week, where the movie \u2014 a genre-defying female-empowerment story set in a dystopian, male-dominated future \u2014 has its world premiere in Critics\u2019 Week.<\/p>\n
The film, which was awarded at the Rotterdam Film Festival\u2019s CineMart and the Cannes Cinefondation\u2019s Atelier while in development, follows on the heels of the director\u2019s buzzy short films \u201cMotorway 65,\u201d which played in competition in Cannes\u00a0in 2021, and \u201cOn Xerxes\u2019 Throne,\u201d a Cannes Critics\u2019 Week prizewinner one year later.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Written by Kalogiropoulou and Louise Groult, it\u2019s produced by Amanda Livanou for Greece\u2019s Neda Film, in co-production with Bertrand Gore and Nathalie Mesuret at Blue Monday Productions, Alexandre Perrier and Fran\u00e7ois-Pierre Clavel at Kidam, Fenia Cossovitsa for Blonde, Onassis Culture, ERT and Authorwave. Playtime is handling world sales.<\/p>\n \u201cGorgon\u00e0\u201d takes place in a small, impoverished city-state dominated by the monstrous refinery that provides it with oil, a resource that allows its inhabitants to cling to survival as the rest of the world \u2014 as seen through a series of foreboding newscasts \u2014 wrestles with civil unrest and environmental collapse.<\/p>\n The city-state is ruled by a gun-toting, hyper-masculine army whose volatile leader, Nikos (Christos Loulis), facing a terminal illness, must arrange for his succession. The competition to succeed him grows fraught when he includes his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Maria, played by \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed\u201d actor Melissanthi Mahut, among the contenders. But her fate will change with the sudden arrival of Eleni (Aurora Marion), a sultry singer who performs at the town\u2019s bar.<\/p>\n What follows is a genre-bending, gender-fluid mash-up that is part queer romance, part revenge fantasy, inspired by the kung-fu, Western and Blaxploitation films Kalogiropoulou thrilled to as a child.<\/p>\n It was in those movies that the filmmaker \u2014 who is also an accomplished painter and visual artist \u2014 says she struggled to locate herself growing up.<\/p>\n \u201cThe director was always a man. And you could see the stereotypes around this,\u201d she tells\u00a0Variety<\/em>. \u201cI was thinking how we could do [the same thing] from a female perspective.\u201d Kalogiropoulou describes \u201cGorgon\u00e0\u201d as the \u201cfulfillment of that fantasy\u201d and a \u201clove letter\u201d to the movies that inspired her.<\/p>\n The film was shot in Eleusina, a polluted industrial town on the outskirts of Athens whose oil refineries offer a grim, post-apocalyptic setting for the director\u2019s dystopian universe. The city also holds significance as the ancient host of the Eleusinian Mysteries, little-understood pagan rites centered on the myth of Persephone\u2019s abduction by the king of the underworld, Hades, and her mother Demeter\u2019s quest to find her.<\/p>\n Those mysteries \u2014 a celebration of female strength \u2014 offered a springboard for Kalogiropoulou\u2019s exploration of \u201cpatriarchy and environmental destruction,\u201d she says, prompting her to envision a bleak future in which masculinity is quite literally toxic.<\/p>\n In \u201cGorgon\u00e0,\u201d the\u00a0director draws from ancient Greek mythology \u2014 \u201cthe starting point of Western narrative,\u201d as she puts it \u2014 as freely as she subverts it, remixing myths and modern influences to create something \u201ctotally different.\u201d The title is a reference to the monstrous, winged gorgons, the most famous of whom, Medusa, Kalogiropoulou describes as \u201cthe ultimate figure of female rage and transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n Imbuing her interpretation of that figure with comic-book superpowers, the director finds the perfect vehicle to tell a story that\u2019s part genre hybrid, part female-empowerment action-thriller. More than just a post-apocalyptic shoot-\u2019em-up \u2014 Greece\u2019s answer to \u201cFury Road\u201d \u2014 \u201cGorgon\u00e0\u201d\u00a0is also a film about love and femininity, in which the love of another woman has the capacity to unlock superpowers. Even, perhaps, to change the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough love, I can find something else that I haven\u2019t explored before,\u201d Kalogiropoulou says. \u201cOf course, [there\u2019s] attraction. But it\u2019s also a power [discovered] through the other person. It\u2019s also about a love of [yourself].\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rising Greek filmmaker Evi Kalogiropoulou brings her long-awaited feature debut, \u201cGorgon\u00e0,\u201d\u00a0to the Venice Film Festival this week, where the movie \u2014 a genre-defying female-empowerment story set in a dystopian, male-dominated future \u2014 has its world premiere in Critics\u2019 Week. The film, which was awarded at the Rotterdam Film Festival\u2019s CineMart and the Cannes Cinefondation\u2019s Atelier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1991258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[359827,359824,359821,359825,359822,359828,359826,359829,359823,333428],"class_list":["post-1991257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-alexandre-perrier","tag-cannes-cinefondations-atelier","tag-evi-kalogiropoulou","tag-francois-pierre-clavel","tag-gorgona","tag-louise-groult","tag-melissanthi-mahut","tag-onassis-culture","tag-rotterdam-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Greek-Director-Evi-Kalogiropoulou-Brings-Genre-Bending-Dystopian-Female-Empowerment-Debut-\u2018Gorgona.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1991257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1991258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1991257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1991257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1991257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}