by FilmInk Staff
For Vivid Sydney 2025 we’re stepping into the mind of Greek avant-garde cinema pioneer Antoinetta Angelidi, presenting all four of her surreal, dream-like, hypnotic feature films for the first time in Australia over four unforgettable nights. This is cinema as a waking dream, where narrative structures fracture and reassemble, challenging the viewer’s perception of time, space and self.
The Hours: A Square Film (1995)
Sunday 25 May, 8:00pm – BOOK NOW
The series kicks off with The Hours: A Square Film, an austere and intimate autobiographical journey through filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi’s life, navigating pain between moments of exhilaration. In this uniquely textured mood piece, childhood and adulthood traumas are related through dreams, memories and fragments, gradually aligning an acceptance of a life.
Topos (1985)
Thursday 29 May, 8:00pm – BOOK NOW
Up next is Topos, a dreamy exploration of the treatment and depiction of women in Renaissance-era Western art constructed from tableaus that exist in a void. Proto-ASMR soundscapes of breath and voice underscore a synthesis of theatre and still-life painting, recording two 24-hour cycles, presenting successively events that may be 20 years or 40 days apart from each other.
Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977)
Sunday 1 June, 8:00pm – BOOK NOW
In her first feature Idées Fixes/Dies Irae (Variations on the Same Theme), Angelidi establishes the experiments with static imagery and fusing language polyphony that would come to define her film work. The formalist games are more playful and accessible here, very much connected to the juxtaposed poetic cinema of the 1970s.
Thief or Reality (2001)
Thursday 5 June, 8:00pm – BOOK NOW
Our Angelidi season concludes with her latest feature Thief or Reality, a darkly optimistic experimental-allegorical film. Three different people: a sculptress of funereal monuments, an actor preparing for Sophocles’ Antigone, and a mother who has lost her child, experience three different versions of reality – with a fourth character, a thief, linking each.
Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality (2023)
Sunday 8 June, 6:15pm – BOOK NOW
Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality is an intimate confession of the Greek feminist avant-garde director Antoinetta Angelidi to her daughter Rea Walldén (director of this film), and the world. Filmed during lockdown inside a flat, Angelidi reflects on her gaze and life, her visions and films, and the devastating experience of going blind.
“Antoinetta Angelidi: She is a capital for our culture.”
— Stratos Kersanidis, Εποχή
“Every time I watch one of the films by Antoinetta, I feel like I am ripped apart. At the same time, she gives me a bittersweet sense of power.”
— Elena Hamalidi, Associate Professor of Art History, Ionian University
“Antoinetta comes as a protector of the lost dream of all those who believed in, and were crushed by, utopia. She takes by the hand every broken soul, every body that was violated, every subject who was made abject by societal violence, every queer person who had no chance to tell her story. She embraces all of us.”
— Fil Ieropoulos, film director
