Scorched Earth
2023 · 16m · Greece, United Kingdom
Directed by Markela Kontaratou
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: sensual, surreal, tense
It's summer in Greece and Stela escapes the Athenian heat to her summer house. While procrastinating on her thesis, she spies on her neighbour and his girlfriend — and soon becomes suspicious that he has committed an atrocious murder.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Greek sun-drenched 16mm giallo with the genders of the voyeur trope flipped — Rear Window with the right person watching, and Locarno-vetted. This is exactly the kind of small genre subversion I'll travel for.
Sun-drenched 16mm giallo at Locarno that subverts Rear Window's voyeur trope toward feminist critique — Markela Kontaratou is working with serious referents and the Athens heat as palpable medium. Genre cinema with curatorial intent.
Sixteen minutes of sun-drenched 16mm neo-noir from Greece, subverting Rear Window's voyeur as a female observer interrogating complicity in gendered violence — that's a smart inversion. Locarno selection and 47K views confirms the giallo-meets-thesis-paper register is connecting.
Reviews
A deliberately voyeuristic experience, in which both the protagonist and the audience occupy a position of uneasy spectatorship — a loud wake up call for people who don't consider violence their business, but whose 'neutrality' makes them its accomplices.
Conceived as a Neo-Noir/Giallo that subverts the trope of a male voyeur, the film interrogates how gender-based violence is mediated and sensationalised, critiquing how violence is transformed into a serialized, grotesque sensation within media culture.
Festivals
- Locarno Film Festival 2023
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2024
- Zagreb Film Festival 2023
- Poitiers Film Festival
- Drama International Short Film Festival 2023
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2023