ABSTRACT
Since the success of Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth festival and an Oscar nomination in 2009, contemporary Greek art cinema has had a recurrent presence in the international film festival circuit. Under the media's spotlight due to the Greek sovereign economic crisis and the 2008 riots that opened the discussion concerning exactly the European identity and the very existence of European Union, the “Greek new wave” has become a lighthouse for contemporary Greek culture and politics through a renewal of forms and themes. Consequently, the rise of unemployment that affected younger or older people, the closure of small business in urban centers, and the consequences of struggling economy in the everyday lives of the Greeks have become a main subject matter of contemporary Greek cinema. This chapter seeks to detect and analyze the representations of such a thematic: the way in which Greek films that circulate within the international film festival network correlate an exportable national imaginary with the representation of work, unemployment, impoverishment, and the pursuit of alternative means of employment. The corpus of their analysis consists of forty-seven art films produced between 2007 and 2017, focusing on two case studies (precarious work and youth unemployment) in order to better designate the different trends that emerge in such representations.
