EVE
Eva (Eve): A close-up on María Plytá, the first Greek female director
The screening of Eva (Eve) at Cannes Classics, also helps to shine a light again on the author of this modern and feminist film: María Plytá. Long forgotten, and yet she is the first Greek female director in the history of Greek cinema and author of seventeen films. With a brand new version restored in 4k, Cannes pays homage to a pioneer.
When María Plytá directed her first films in the early 1950s, Greek cinema was a world that was almost exclusively male-dominated. Born in Thessaloniki in 1915, María Plytá was first and foremost a novelist and playwright. She then became the first woman in Greece to step behind the camera and direct — between 1950 and 1972 — seventeen feature films.
While producer Filopímin Fínos declared that “a woman cannot be a director,” María Plytá made melodramas inspired by Italian neorealism, with close attention to the working classes and to the upheavals of postwar Greek society. Her female characters, with Eve leading the way, are haunted by questions that challenge the patriarchal society of the time.
Eva (Eve) is the story of a married woman who, during summer vacation, begins a passionate affair on a Greek island. In this romantic melodrama, María Plytá films above all a sense of entrapment, female desire, and the violence of norms — social and otherwise. In a way, Eva (Eve) already seems to foreshadow the beginnings of the French New Wave. The film is also often compared to La Pointe Courte by Agnès Varda, released two years later. In addition to this, the filmmaker dared to film — a rarity for its time — the male body, which she does not hesitate to shoot as an object of desire, along with a heroine who refuses to remain in her allotted place.
Presented by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
Restored in 4k by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with Alatas Films and Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou and in cooperation with the Greek Film Archive. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Screening in the presence of Margaret Bodde, Executive Director of The Film Foundation and Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou, Professor and Principal Investigator of Plyta’s Unknown Cinema (PUC).
