Tsangari’s cult business of going
Balancing between experimental and independent filmmaking, Athina-Rachel Tsangari’s feature film, «The Slow Business of Going,» began life as a university thesis. Later, it went on to conquer festivals all around the globe. «I don’t think the film is experimental, and that is because everything in it has been done before,» says Tsangari. «Its narrative structure, for instance, is not traditional, but at the same time, all the individual stories have a classic structure and genre. The Greek public is one of the most educated and intelligent audiences in the world and if the film can get through to its audience, I suspect and I hope that opinion will be divided. So far, people have either loved it or hated it. I was expecting the film to be a hit with the cinephiles, for instance, but I realized that cinema-goers are far more flexible; the film acquired cult status with an age group of 18- to 35-year-olds, irrespective of cinematic preferences. Some people prefer one story to another, and so there is a kind of dialogue among them.» The film was shot over a period of five years, in 13 different cities. How did the director get involved in such an adventure? «It was not a conscious decision,» says Tsangari. «It was initially developed as a short-feature thesis film, in which the story unfolded in three cities. In the end, I was looking at three hours’ worth of material; it was hard to stop at that point. I only gave up when I ran out of money, after I had spent all the scholarship funds, my own savings and my credit cards. Essentially, however, that stage ended when Michel Demopoulos chose the film for the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Banking on America’s strong infrastructure and support for indies, I managed to take advantage of free tickets and hotel rooms, while the actors went unpaid. I was lucky in that we worked as a community; the boundaries between my personal life and the shoot were blurred.» Since 1995, Tsangari has been the director of the annual Cinematexas festival, a short-film festival which has developed into a vast forum of image experimentation. Besides the September festival, Tsangari is working on two other projects: a science-fiction screwball comedy – which she would like to shoot in Texas, using images from the Cyclades – and a women’s movie, offered to her by an American studio. «In the beginning, I resisted the idea, but now I’m working on it and I’m very keen to find out what kind of restrictions they will impose when I hand in the script. I see this as a test of stamina.»
