In summer of 2015, Greek society teetered on the brink. For six months, the ruling party, SYRIZA, strove to steer the ship of state out of a perfect storm. At the helm, ostensibly, its colorful Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, exuded an air of confidence that suggested he had a plan even while SYRIZA’s detractors at home and abroad believed his government was driving the nation towards the rocks. This dramatic showdown had all the potential of a political thriller, a fact not lost on director Costa-Gavras, who in 2019 directed a film based on Varoufakis’s memoir of those heady days, Adults in the Room.

This talk reflects on Greek cinema’s focus since 1955 on such moments of krisis and its use of real life tragic figures such as Varoufakis or Melina Mercouri who appear simultaneously on movie screens and the stage of politics.

Vangelis Calotychos has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Columbia. Since 2014, he is Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has published widely on Greek literature, cultural studies; and questions of identity, representation, and politics. In 2013, The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece After 1989 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), an interdisciplinary analysis of Greece's position within and without the Balkans and Europe after the Cold War, was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize. Currently his research focuses on Greek film. Professor Calotychos is the Executive Director of the Modern Greek Studies Association.