Wishbone

  WISHBONE

Kostas, a young security guard at a public hospital, after the sudden death of his older brother, is forced to take care of his niece and find money to save their house from debts. While he has lost all hope, a paramedic offers to help him. The price, however, will be high.

The film premiered at Galway film Fleadh(World Competition), had official participations in 34.FFC(festival of east European Cinema-Cottbus),Arras film festival(European discovery),Festival del Cinema Europeo(Golden Olive Tree competition),Thessaloniki International film Festival, Sofia international Film Festival(Balkan Film Competition).

The film received the audience award Michalis Kakoyiannis  at the 65th Thessaloniki film festival ,together with the debut actor award.

Best Photography award at the Festival del Cinema Europeo (Golden Olive Tree Competition)

Astra Audience award at the San Francisco Greek film Festival, Best Director Award at the Los Angeles Greek film Festival, Jury’s favorite  award at the Annaba International film festival

Director’s note

The story on which the  book and  the film are based is real and based on the practices of some large law firms, which fabricate cases of medical negligence without any ethical concerns when it comes to making a profit. The protagonist of the film, Costas, starts his journey as an innocent but life and wrong choices make it so that he gets tangled up in that environment that is so against his nature.

The texture of the film became clear to me from the beginning. It had to be real and simple. The style was determined by realism. But although the story has a strong social orientation, I was more interested in human nature. The way I see things is the way of silence, and sadness. So in this film, as in the previous ones, the focus is always on people, family, fate: fragile things. Nevertheless, the simultaneous portrayal of the fragmented social fabric of Greek society adds a different and special layer.

Penny  Panayotopoulou  is  a Greek  film maker, screen writer, and producer. She holds a LLB in law from University of Athens and a degree in film and photo arts from the Polytechnic of Central London.  Some of her more notable works include: Hard Goodbyes: My Father  (2002), which premiered in the 55th Locarno Film Festival, was awarded the Bronze Leopard for Best Actor, and later participated in numerous international festivals; September (2013), which premiered in the official competition of the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to critical acclaim, was nominated for six Hellenic Film Academy Awards and won the award for best leading actress; and  the  documentary series, The Magic in People which run for many years on Greek TV and consists of hour-long intimate narratives of individuals defined by the bereavement. 

Wishbone is her third feature.

Summary of reviews

In her latest film, Greek director Penny Panayotopoulou uses realism and poetry to convey the condition of a family holding strong in a fragmented society, set against a backdrop of malpractice...

...It’s a movie which could just as easily have been shot by Ken Loach, the master of English social cinema... 

...There are touches of poetry here and there too (the close-ups on the little girl are stunning), which provide respite and lend hope to this particularly sad and hard-hitting social portrait.

https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/470416/

Penny Panayotopoulou's Sous tension (Wishbone, 2024) is as close to social reality as you can get, with a camera that seems to follow the protagonist's point of view, to the point of empathetically testing his electrocardiogram. It plunges us into the daily life of a man in an unstructured society, where the welfare state and public service seem to have completely disappeared, leaving a logic of survival that violently opposes social classes...

...On the other hand, Penny Panayotopoulou moves away from the unique approach of Italian neo-realism to construct places that are particularly charged with meaning, such as the hospital and, above all, the family home, which is open to all winds, while the garden is slow to experience the springtime rebirth of the fruit trees... 

In a timeless way, Penny Panayotopoulou's film goes beyond the context of Greece to question the type of human society we live in or wish to build.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/cinemas-mediterraneens/article/151124/arras-2024-sous-tension-wishbone-de-penny-panayotopoulou

Penny Panayotopoulou's social drama captures chilling urban landscapes and claustrophobic interiors with cinematic sophistication - living spaces full of social fault lines in which the protagonist loses control of himself and is only able, with no small effort, to maintain his belief in the good in people.

“A documentary-like parable that describes where a society slides when the basic infrastructure collapses and everyone takes responsibility for only one thing: themselves”Text by Bernd Buder.