One of the more enjoyably glossy world premieres unveiled this week at Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Iman is a family-in-crisis melodrama with punchy thriller elements and a killer plot twist. It was co-written and co-directed by Cyprus-born Corinna Avraamidou, returning to the big screen with just her second feature after after a long stretch of TV work, and Kyriacos Tofarides. Almost all the sun-kissed locations here look like seductive promotional photo-shoots for the Cypriot tourist board, which makes sense on some level, given that most of the film’s budget came from the island’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth.
It may touch on timely political themes including Islamist terrorism, anti-immigrant racism, abortion rights and toxic masculinity, but Iman is a deluxe soap opera at heart, putting a Greek-Cypriot spin on the kind of overheated emotions and broadly drawn characters more often seen in Latin American telenovelas. This is not the kind of film that wins festival prizes, but it is polished, pulse-racing entertainment featuring glamorous locations and a strikingly attractive cast, which never hurts at the box office. Beyond pretty solid domestic crowd-pleasing prospects, the overall high-gloss thriller elements could also stir interest outside Greece, with streaming services an obvious potential outlet.
The layered screenplay features three parallel plot-lines whose overlapping connections only become clear during the final act. One thread features young Cypriot woman Iman (Stephanie Atala), who travels to an unnamed Arab country to join an armed Islamist jihad group, where she is soon being groomed and recruited for a suicide bombing mission against a gathering of VIP “infidels” back on her home island. The bomb attack is presented by her stern male handlers as a divine privilege, and she clearly has no choice in the matter, despite confessing her ethical doubts to her fellow would-be martyr Leila (Rita Hayek).
Meanwhile, back on Cyprus, blue-haired teenage punkette Michelle (Pambina Georgiou) is going through a very different kind of rebellion in the form of a volatile, abusive relationship with her bad-boy lover Angelos (Prokopis Agathokleous), a macho hot-head with a violently jealous temper and toxic racist views. Just as she summons the confidence to break free from his destructive orbit, unexpected pregnancy brings extra complications.
A third storyline involves Abdallah (Andreas Tselepos), a civil engineer of Muslim heritage who is married to Irene (Margarita Zachariou), a Greek-Cypriot soprano singer. The pair enjoy a privileged high-society lifestyle in their luxurious family mansion, but disaster strikes with the collapse of an Arab refugee settlement building designed by Abdallah, killing seven people. The boss of the architecture company involved, Irene’s father Kostis (Varnavas Kyriazis), cynically shifts all the blame onto his son-in-law, then pressures Irene to divorce Abdallah to save the family name. Thus the seeds of future disaster are sewn in treachery, shame and injustice.
Iman stretches plausibility with its coincidence-heavy narrative and monolithic characters, who all seem to be defined by simplistic single-issue motives. But Avraamidou and Tofarides clearly know how to build suspense, dropping a head-spinning plot twist in their final act that smartly brings into focus all of the film’s fuzzy time-lines and shifting identities. On a purely sensory level, this modestly budgeted production also looks magnificent. Technical credits are slick and impressive, especially cinematographer Sofronis Sofroniou’s soaring aerial swoops and balletic long shots, including a deftly choreographed dance-party sequence that opens as a giddy romantic reunion but ends in a violent assault. Even when the story blurs the line between serious drama and escapist trash, the packaging is never less than beautiful.
Directors, screenwriters: Corinna Avraamidou, Kyriacos Tofarides
Cast: Stephanie Atala, Rita Hayek, Antreas Tselepos, Margarita Zachariou, Prokopis Agathocleous, Pambina Georgiou, Varnavas Kyriazis
Cinematography: Sofronis Sofroniou
Editing: Elina Antoniou
Music: Dimitris Zachariou
Producer: Andros Achilleos
Production company, world sales: AB Seahorse Film Production (Cyprus)
Venue: Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Crossing Borders)
In Greek, Arabic
110 minutes
