THE MAN WITH THE ANSWERS (O ANTHROPOS ME TIS APANTISEIS)

Stelios Kammitsis | GREECE & CYPRUS & ITALY| 2020 | 80 min | ENGLISH & GREEK & GERMAN & ITALIAN

On a long-distance road trip from Greece to Bavaria, Victoras and Mathias become absorbed in their duelling loneliness and the jaw-dropping natural sights, entering a zone where it may be harder than they thought to leave one another behind.

At the start, Victoras (an adorably curt Vasilis Magouliotis) wants to fly, soaring and tumbling above the ground in trampoline acrobatics, but is always forced to return to earth. Six years prior, Victoras’ mother met a German man in Greece and departed for Bavaria, leaving him to care for his grandmother alone. Upon the hospital-bound woman’s death, and disoriented by this new form of gravity, Victoras sets off in an old clunker with no other plan but to get to Bavaria. Along the way, he sees a man stealing a sandwich, and soon the man has wheedled his way into hitching a ride. Mathias (Anton Weil) is a German student with a sense of adventure, convincing Victoras to forego his single-mindedness and meander along “beautiful provincial routes.” With cutting, but flirtatious banter and playing question games to pass the time, they find that some queries are too complex for simple answers.