The Greek Weird Wave: How civil unrest gave the world Yorgos Lanthimos

Thu 29 October 2026 23:00, UK

Everything just feels weird, doesn’t it? It might sound childish to say, but then everything from movies to politics to pop culture, whether it’s in English, Greek or Mandarin, is saying it too, so we must be onto something, right?

It’s completely bent out of shape, and the people in charge seem to be able to do nothing more than wring their hands about it. Saying that they’ve done everything they can to solve the issue, except for the thing that would actually solve the issue, which they can’t do because the world’s far more complicated to have any sort of simple solution to it. Anyway, we can solve climate change by sorting out soft plastics from our hard plastics, so chop-chop. We’re all trying to save the world, aren’t we?

Few countries have faced as much debilitating strangeness as Greece has over the past two decades. The one-two punch of the riots surrounding the murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by Athens police in 2008, followed by the complete collapse of the Greek economy in 2010, saw the country profoundly destabilised.

Throughout it all, art provides a way for a country’s citizens to express that feeling, and in the 2000s, there was a number of exciting directors coming out of the Greek independent film scene willing to do just that.

The issue was that they were working via funding provided by the country’s Greek Film Centre. Funding that the country, y’know, didn’t have anymore. The widespread emergency austerity measures put in place after the country went bankrupt affected the arts first, and suddenly, these directors were forced to reckon with their country’s state of national emergency with a budget of 20 bucks and a tub of tzatziki. Credit to ’em though, the mad bastards actually did it.

The best example of this is the first film to make waves outside of the country from this time, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. On the surface, the movie is nothing more than fairly static shots of people in a house talking. Yet Lanthimos employs every trick in the book to make the picture a profoundly surreal experience, and the surface-level simplicity only serves to heighten just how profoundly strange the rest of the movie is.

Every stilted line delivery. Every shot that lingers minutes too long. Every bizarre plot non-sequiter. Every time that shockingly dark concepts and deeds are talked about with the same everyday attitude you’d discuss the week’s shop with, all helped define the movement that would come from this period of profound civil unrest and upheaval, known as the Greek Weird Wave, and while Lanthimos became the most famous export from it, he was far from alone.

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg and Alexandros Avranas’ Miss Violence all used similar tactics at the same period of the mid-2000s, as did Lanthimos’ follow-up movie Alps. These were followed up in the early 2010s by the wave splitting into two. The most high-profile version of the movement came thanks to Tsangari and Lanthimos receiving offers from the UK film industry and Hollywood, respectively, after impressing with their early works. Their 2015 works, Chevalier and The Lobster, respectively, showed what they were capable of with a bigger budget without sacrificing the strangeness of their early work.

However, the success of their early work also led to more Greek directors following in their footsteps. The likes of Yorgos Zois, Christos Nikou and Jacqueline Lentzou were arguably given the space to make the movies they wanted to make thanks to the success of their previous directors and prove that the Greek film industry is in much ruder health than it’s been in a long, long time.

All thanks to movies unafraid to be weird, off-putting and disturbing. Just like real life.