Renos Haralambidis has represented in his career of twenty plus years, a new generation of Greek filmmakers, who have been making playful contemporary films, which blur the boundaries between real life and fiction, and which are made, as the title of his 1997 award-winning hit film, No Budget Story suggests, for almost no money at all. In this book, I speak not only as an American film scholar who has appreciated Greek cinema over the past fifty years, but as an award-winning screenwriter myself, who has gotten to know and appreciate Haralambidis personally over the past twenty years. I have thus been impressed not only with how his films have been received in Greece, but I have been present for enthusiastic audiences in Great Britain and across the United States.
I thus wish to speak about the importance of his first four feature films, No Budget Story (1997), Cheap Smokes (2000), The Heart of the Beast (2005) and Four Black Suits (2010) that make Renos, important not just to Greek cinema, but to cinema around this swiftly changing world.
Andrew Horton
CV:
Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies Emeritus of the University of Oklahoma, an award winning screenwriter, and the author of thirty books on film, screenwriting and cultural studies including, Screenwriting for a global market (U of California Press 2004), Henry Bumstead and the world of Hollywood art direction (U of Texas Press, 2003), Writing the character centered screenplay (U. of California Press, 2000, 2nd edition), The films of Theo Angelopoulos (Princeton U Press, 2nd edition, 1999), and Laughing out loud: Writing the comedy centered screenplay (U. of California Press, l999).
His films include Brad Pitt’s first feature film, The dark side of the sun and much awarded Something in between (l983, Yugoslavia, directed by Srdjan Karanovic). He has given screenwriting workshops around the world including Norway, Germany, England, the Czech Republic, Greece, New Zealand, Switzerland and throughout the United States. The Library Journal wrote about his Character centered screenplay, “Horton walks away with an Oscar in the valuable books for the prospective scripter category with his latest rendering.”