Les Abysses
Nico Papatakis • 1963 • France • 94 minutes
This allegorical portrait of the Algerian resistance was inspired by the real-life story of the Papin sisters, two maids who brutally murdered their employers in 1930s France—also the basis for Jean Genet’s influential 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie.
The Shepherds of Disorder
Nico Papatakis • 1967 • Greece • 121 minutes
The Shepherds of Disorder (Thanos and Despina) juxtaposes an anthropological and materialist study of a rigid rural community with the mythologically imbued, forbidden romance between a rebellious shepherd and the angelic and compliant daughter of a rich conservative family, engaged in an erotically charged power game.
Gloria Mundi
Nico Papatakis • 1976 • France • 116 minutes
Papatakis’s most psychedelic and intellectually challenging film, Gloria Mundi, a virulent denunciation of consumer capitalism and a hypocritical left-wing intelligentsia that deems itself political but does not take any action, begins with a scream and ends with an explosion.
The Photograph
Nico Papatakis • 1986 • Greece/France • 112 minutes
Papatakis’s most accessible, gripping, and poignant work is a meticulously crafted, intimate meditation on immigration and exile centering on a 26-year-old Greek man fresh out of prison (where he was tortured for being a communist’s son) who leaves for France in hopes of a better life, and where he strikes up a complicated friendship with a distant relative.
Walking a Tightrope
Nico Papatakis • 1992 • France • 119 minutes
The director’s final film—starring Michel Piccoli as a fictional version of Papatakis’s friend Jean Genet—is a compendium of the themes and motifs that pervade his distinctive filmography, including the torturous nature of love, the suffering induced by exile, and suicide as an act of rebellion.
Les Abysses