…The lupine presence is more figurative in Aran Hughes and Christina Koutsospyrou’s ‘To the Wolf’, which was one of the standouts at the Toronto International Film Festival’s recent City to City programme—which is ironic because it takes place far from that series’ designated epicenter of Athens. Shot over two years in a tiny, decaying Greek village with the cooperation and collaboration of its small, aged population, the film slips casually into the category of what Robert Koehler calls “the cinema of in between”—a halfway ethnographic comedy about trickle-down economics. (Alternate title: Land Without Bread, orAnything Else).“
“The channel is on strike,” carps one local about the blurry television buzzing in the back of a bar, a one-liner with deeper implications. Like most of the notable films to emerge from Greece in the past half-decade, To the Wolf deals with the country’s financial ruin, albeit obliquely: by focusing on a community already marginalized by their remote location and old-fashioned way of life, Hughes and Koutsopryou wisely satirize the notion of nostalgia (Greece being more equipped than most civilizations to talk about “the good old days”). The static camerawork and patient pacing makeTo the Wolf a demanding film, and yet it also has the faintly bewitching quality of a fairy tale—one where the Big Bad Wolf seems to have eaten his fill before the cameras ever rolled.
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