Special Event: Director Athina Rachel Tsangari in person!

Sex, death, and cinema. The first two predate the third by a considerable margin, but where would cinema be without them? Nowhere, that’s where. So come out and poke, prod, and ponder the body morose and electric tonight at the HFA, where Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari (a visiting professor at Harvard this year) will preside over a screening of and discussion about her second feature, the wonderfully weird and moving ATTENBERG.

Tapping into the deep-quirk deadpanitude of Aki Kaurismaki, Tsangari’s subtle, slow-moving film concerns Marina (Ariana Labed), a 23-year-old nature-lover (she’s obsessed with David Attenborough) belatedly coming (kicking and singing) out of her shell as her beloved father dies and her best friend pushes her gently towards sexual experience.

Besides Kaurismaki, ATTENBERG shares genes with such affecting studies of oddball young women and their vexed friendships as GHOST WORLD (2001) and FUNNY HA HA (2012), as well as some slight affinity with the much more willfully bizarre DOGTOOTH (2009), whose director, Yorgos Lanthimos, appears here as Marina’s sweetly awkward, tight-lipped lover. He listens to Suicide (“Alan Vega is a god,” he avers), so she knows he must be all right.

Half sex, half death, and all cinema, ATTENBERG is a thoroughly winning lark, as uplifting as it is downbeat, and as reassuring as it is scrupulously sentiment-free.

10/17 // 7PM
95 minutes // Greek with English Subtitles
$12

Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA