Eternal Stories: Animating Ancient Greek Myths
A film screening curated by theatre director Magdalena Zira
Greek myths continue to resonate because they capture timeless human struggles—family conflict, war, fate, and the tension between personal desire and communal duty—while every new retelling reflects the anxieties and ideas of its own era. Over the past century, and especially in recent decades, these ancient stories have surged back into contemporary culture, inspiring artists drawn to their intensity and emotional extremes. The films in this program reinterpret these myths through the imaginative freedom of animation, blending satire, poetry, psychological depth, and visual nods to antiquity to reveal how alive and adaptable our connection to the ancient world remains.
Screening films
Harpya, Raoul Servais, 8:36, 1979
Servais revisits the epic poem Argonautica and re-imagines the myth of King Phineus and the Harpies, the hybrid monsters that perpetually devour his food, in a contemporary European middle-class setting imbued with delicate irony.
A Greek Tragedy, Nicole Van Goethem, Belgium, 7:00, 1985
Inspired by the symbolism of the Parthenon, to tell a humorous story with a feminist edge: her aging, exhausted Caryatids have to hold up the crumbling edifice of Ancient Greece, day in, day out, for eternity– until it gets too much.
Achilles, Barry Purves, 11:00, 1995
Barry Purves’ Achilles is one of the first retellings of the Iliad in popular culture to focus with raw honesty on the queer love story at its centre, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. The film’s theatrical setting also reveals the brutality behind the traditional tale of
heroism.
AMF’s Tiresias by Ann-Marie Fleming (Canada), 1998, 4:57
An adaptation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Fleming examines the difference between men and women through the story of a prophet who has lived in both genders.
Alcestis, Lewis Klahr, 20:00 approx. 2021
Klahr uses a collage of comic book imagery evocative of a modernist Hollywood setting to re-imagine Euripides’ enigmatic play, in which a woman who has agreed to die in her husband’s place comes back from the dead– but is forever changed.
Electra, Daria Kascheeva, 2023, 27:00
Combines live action, animation and Barbie dolls to create a psychoanalytical re-telling of the most famous Greek myth about the complicated relationship between a daughter and her father.
Mature audiences
