As part of a distinctly ‘other’ Europe, but not particularly falling under classic postcolonial categories, Greece and Greek cinema offer interesting insights into the state of contemporary European cinemas and global art cinema. Besides the illustrious career of Greek auteur, Theo Angelopoulus, Greek cinema has stayed largely on the periphery of more globally known European cinemas. In fact, the work of Angelopoulos has been deeply invested in Greece's transnational identity within Europe, particularly in the travel between East and West in Topio stin omichli/ Landscape in the Mist (1988) and in To vlemma tou Odyssea/ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995),1 which meditates on the notion of the ‘first gaze’ of Greek cinema being dispersed across multiple borders among the Balkans. The sudden popularity of Greek cinema in the late 2000s is surprising given that ‘it emerged in the context of an almost total alienation of audiences from Greek cinema throughout the 1970s, 1980s and for a large part of the 1990s’ (Papadimitriou, 497). During this period, Greek audiences preferred popular genre cinema and abandoned the largely state-funded art cinema which was stymied by an inability to find distribution, leaving the only exhibition venue for ‘quality’ Greek cinema to the Thessaloniki Film Festival, founded in 1960. (Papdimitriou, 498) More recently, starting in 2009, a spate of independent films from Greece, notably Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010, Greece), Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009, Greece) and Alpeis/Alps (Lanthimos, 2011, Greece/France), have garnered some attention, not only because of the uniqueness of the films’ sense of absurdity but by the very fact that this new wave of films has made the nation of Greece more known to the world. What is, indeed, unique about the new Greek cinema is how the press has labelled it as not simply a new wave but a ‘weird’ Greek new wave. The Guardian has described it thus: