Kala azar
Building on her work as a visual artist, Greek director Janis Rafa delivers a strikingly original feature debut with this compellingly weird road movie about a pair of obsessive animal lovers whose lives revolve around scavenging roadkill and conducting pet funerals. Played by Penelope Tsilika and Dimitris Lalos, this odd couple appear to live a pretty animalistic existence themselves, sharing minimal dialogue and a queasy disregard for personal hygiene. Named after a parasitic disease that kills humans and animals alike, KALA AZAR serves up a feast of earthy humor and tender emotional vignettes, all spiced with stomach-churning close-ups of flesh, food and filth. Deliciously strange.
Penelope Tsilika, Dimitris Lalos, Michele Valley
- Notes From Ed LachmanJanis Rafa is known as a Greek conceptual artist, but she’s also a talented filmmaker and made this incredible film about relationships that blur the line between animals and humans, and makes a sort of equality between all creatures, whatever state they’re in. It’s poetic, but also rooted in a reality that reveals how humans affect their environment—even between the living and the dead.