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Showing posts from February, 2011

All in the Family: Dogtooth Is a Dark Parable of Family as Constructed Reality

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Recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Language category and winner of the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival, the dark, kinky Greek psychological drama Dogtooth bypassed Atlanta on its tour of big city art houses. Heralded by smart critics across the country, this film is now accessible via Netflix and Amazon in your own home, probably the best place to experience the skin-crawling excesses of this creepy gem with special relevance to artists interested in its critique of patriarchy, government, family, and the highly subjective, easily shaped notion of “reality.” A prolonged shout-out to the power of nurture over nature, Dogtooth centers on a Greek businessmen and father (Christos Stergioglou) who lives with his family in an Edenic, gated compound of green lawns and swaying palm trees in an unidentified rural section of Greece. The father has created his own disturbingly self-defined utopia inside. Behind the wall that encircles his f