The screening on Thursday 22 October will be introduced by Film Lecturer Tonia Kazakopoulou.

Synopsis:

It’s midnight on a deserted street in Athens. A young woman is stabbed to death by a stranger, who instantly slips into the shadows. Uppon his arrest, alleged perpetrator John Zachos immediately confesses to the murder but during the trial it becomes apparent that his testimony is an impression of what he has read in the press and is full of inconsistencies. The search for the truth is interrupted and the battle between society and individual rages on.

Onassis Channel:

This monumental debut by Tonia Marketaki was based on real-life events, which caused great controversy in the media and mesmerised audiences at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. This labyrinthine portrait of a self-confessed murderer - who is shaped and brutalized by toxic masculinity - unfolds across the shadowed streets of a city marked by uncertainty and listlessness. Marketaki does not focus on the crime, but only uses it as a springboard for a feminist exploration that is light years ahead of its time. John the Violent is a definitive study of ethics in 1960s Greece, a stifling delineation of a psychologically fractured social fabric looking for redemption.

Dr Tonia Kazakopoulou is a Lecturer in Film & Television at the University of Reading. Her research interests include women's cinema of small nations, and particularly of Greece; contemporary European and world cinemas; the politics of representation in film and television. She has been the curator of the international standing conference Contemporary Greek Film Cultures, and she has also published on women's cinema, on Greek women screenwriters, on contemporary Greek cinema and motherhood, as well as on the female characters in Yorgos Lanthimos' films.