Efthimis Filippou

Few contemporary writers have transformed the grammar of everyday life as radically as Greek screenwriter Efthimis Filippou. Across his collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos and his work with other filmmakers both in Greece and further afield, Filippou has created worlds that are at once recognisable and deeply disquieting, in which language becomes ritual, relationships become systems and the most ordinary gestures acquire an unsettling charge.

Screenwriter of the Absurd and Uncanny

From Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer to works with other directors such as Chevalier, Pity and, most recently, Rosebush Pruning, Filippou’s writing moves between absurdity and menace with deadpan humour, exposing our often extremely brittle facades and the even more fragile rules that govern our senses of intimacy, desire, family and belonging.

This retrospective offers a journey through a distinctive cinematic imagination, one that always manages to locate the uncanny within the familiar, and the profoundly human within the absurd. An on-stage conversation with Filippou will offer a rare opportunity to encounter the voice and thinking behind these singular worlds, while he’ll also introduce a screening of Nikos Papatakis’ 1986 drama The Photograph, a film reminiscent in many ways of Filippou’s own screenwriting obsessions.

When I started writing scripts 20 years ago, I was really annoyed by the fact that the film created had nothing to do with what I had imagined. Now I know that ‘this had nothing to do with what I had imagined’ is the best thing that can happen to a script.

Efthimis Filippou