Athina Rachel Tsangari (Greek: Αθηνά Ραχήλ Τσαγγάρη, IPA:[aθiˈnaraˈçilt͡saŋˈɡari]; born 2 April 1966) is a Greek filmmaker. Some of her most notable works include her feature films, The Slow Business of Going (2000), Attenberg (2010) and Chevalier (2015) as well as the co-production of Yorgos Lanthimos' films Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2009), and Alps (2011). In her versatile work for cinema, she has also founded and been director of the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival.[1] In 2014-2015, she was invited to Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies department as a visiting lecturer on art, film, and visual studies.[2]
Her first experience working in film was with a small role in Richard Linklater's 1991 film Slacker.[5][6] Since then, Tsangari has assumed multiple roles within the film industry.
Film director
Her debut short film, Fit (1994), was created for her NYU studies and was shortlisted for the Annual Student Academy Awards.[7][2]
For her MFA thesis, she created her first feature-length film, The Slow Business of Going (2000), a lo-fi/sci-fi road movie, shot in multiple formats (8mm, 16mm, mini-DV and 35 stills) in hotel rooms of nine cities around the world and then transferred the final cut of the film to 35mm.[8] The film premiered at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 2000[9] and won best film at the New York Underground Film Festival in 2002.[10] The film was described by Domitila Bedel in Senses of Cinema as "a permanent erection for the eye".[8] The 2002 Village Voice Critics Poll listed it as one of the year’s “best first films” and it now belongs to MoMA’s permanent film collection.[11][4]
Her short film The Capsule (2012), commissioned by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, was screened at the Locarno, Toronto and Sundance film festivals to critical acclaim.
In 2013, she was one of seventy directors invited by the Venice Film Festival to participate in the project Venezia 70 - Future Reloaded,[15] for which she made the short science fiction film 24 Frames Per Century (2013).
In 2013, she also created a fundraising film for the Benaki Museum, the pioneering museum of Greek heritage, narrated by Willem Dafoe.[16]
In 2015, her third feature-length film Chevalier (2015) was released — a buddy comedy set on a yacht in the Aegean Sea — premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. It won the Best Film prize in official competition at the BFI-London Film Festival 2015. It also received a Best Actor prize for its all-male ensemble cast, and a Jury Special Mention for directing, from the Sarajevo IFF. It had its North American premiere at the Toronto IFF, followed by the New York Film Festival to critical acclaim. Chevalier (2015) has also been nominated for the 2016 Foreign Language Film Oscar.[17]
TV director
Tsangari directed two episodes of the Canal+/ ZDF/ Netflix historical drama series Borgia[2].
Her most recent TV work includes the film direction of the BBC Two TV series, Trigonometry. The TV series premiered at the “Berlinale Series” section of Berlinale in 2020.[18][19]
Film producer
In 2005, Tsangari founded Haos Film, a production and post-production studio based in Athens.[20] Her producing credits include three films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos: Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2009), as an associate producer, and Alps (2011). She is a co-producer on Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (the third installment of the "Before Sunrise" series, shot in Messenia, Greece), where she also appeared in the role of Ariadni.[21]
In 1995, Tsangari founded[23][1] and became the artistic director[24] of the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, a film festival for experimental work which ran until 2006.
She also served as a creative advisor at the Sundance Feature Film Program Directing Lab and at the Sundance Istanbul and Jordan screenwriter labs.
