Religion and Greek cinema

Given the popularity of religion in Greece, it is strange that very few religious films were produced over the last one hundred years and few discussions around them were ever attempted.

We would suggest that religious films are the films whose architectural design presupposes post-historical grand narratives in order to visualise events, from the perspective of their own finality: it is the eschatological aspect of the story and the image, or indeed the eschaton within the story and the image that makes a film religious. It is the perspective that makes a film religious, not the iconographic models employed. Within such a perspective, the camera and its visual fields frame the invisible but ubiquitous presence of the numinous, of the uncanny, and the miraculous, even if they are depicting misery, poverty or misfortune.

In Greek cinema such eschatological or epiphanic presences are missing and indeed the absence of religiosity as a perspective in Greek film history remains an open question for research and discussion.