On Tuesday 18 September at 19:00 and on Wednesday 19 September at 21:00 the film The Son of Sofia (Greece/ France/Bulgaria, 2017, 110min, colour) by Elina Psykou will be screened in cinema Utopia in the original Greek and Russian version with English subtitles. The film not suitable for children under 16 years.Synopsis
Athens, 2004 summer Olympic Games. 11-year-old Misha arrives from Russia to live with his mother, Sofia. What he doesn’t know is that there is a father waiting for him there. While Greece is living the Olympic dream, Misha will get violently catapulted into the adult world, riding on the dark side of his favourite fairy tales.
“Son of Sofia” is a violent, absurd, urban fairy tale about the inability to express and accept love. It's a story about the clandestine violence of family love and at the same time a story about how we raise our children and how our homeland grooms future citizens. Two men vie for one woman’s attention, just like two different worlds stake their claim to the same society.
In that sense, it is essentially about identity formation: national, religious, sexual, linguistic and political. The historical background is the summer of 2004, when Athens was hosting the Olympic Games. It’s the moment when the country’s socioeconomic rise had reached its peak and - in hindsight - the moment that marked the beginning of the end of Greece's national innocence, an experience similar to the coming of age of son of Sofia. At the end of the film, nothing will ever be the same - neither for Greece nor for the young protagonist.
