Taglines: Life Upside Down.
Worlds Apart movie storyline. Present day Greece – while the number of stranded refugees rises and work places dwindle, love blossoms in the capital Athens: 1. Daphne, a student, falls in love with Farris from Syria– which shall never be found out by her fascist father. 2. Married manager Giorgios begins an affair with the Swedish personnel manager Elise – without knowing that his name is on her black list. 3. Housewife Maria and the German historian Sebastian meet at a supermarket. Despite barely being able to understand each other, they still speak the same language.
Worlds Apart tells three separate stories each following a love story between a foreigner and a Greek. Each story represents a different generation falling in love during a time of socioeconomic turmoil that dominates Southern Europe as a whole, only to connect as a single story in the end. The three stories are bound together by the story of a fourth Greek less positive. Christopher Papakaliatis wrote, produced, directed and acts.
Three Greeks have chance encounters with strangers in three interconnected narratives set in Greece. Daphne (Niki Vakali), a young Greek woman, falls in love with Farris (Tawfeek Barhom), a Syrian refugee after he rescues her from an assault. Their relationship, though, is forbidden by her domineering, anti-immigrant father, Antonis (Minas Chatzisavvas).
In the second narrative, Giorgios (Christopher Papakaliatis), a salesman for a struggling company, meets Elise (Andrea Osvart), a Scandavian woman, at a hotel bar and they end up sleeping together. Their affair becomes more than just a one night stand, though, when they gradually develop feelings for one another. Complicating matters further, she happens to be the efficiency expert in charge of laying off the employees at the company that he works at.
In the third story, Maria (Maria Kavoyianni), a housewife in an unhappy marriage, converses with a friendly stranger, Sebastian, a retired professor from Germany, in front of a supermarket. They agree to meet once a week at the same day and time in front of the supermarket while sparking a friendship that blossoms into a sweet romance.
Film Review for Worlds Apart
Three generations of Greeks struggle with intercultural romance amidst the turmoil of modern Athens in “Worlds Apart,” a romantic melodrama by Greek writer, director and actor Christoforos (Christopher) Papakaliatis.
This wistful, melancholy yet hopeful romance has a warmth that singes, a poetry to its stock situations and a biting allegory about the country where Western civilization began facing a world of troubles, not all of its own making.
Daphne (Niki Vakali) is the sort of coed who would cross the street to avoid contact with the sea of immigrant beggars and street peddlers that have flooded her country, right in the middle of its economic collapse. But when she’s grabbed and about to be gang-raped, a young Syrian (Tawfeek Barhom) comes to her rescue.
She sees him a few days later, and he sees her. She won’t make eye contact, but he is persistent. He has saved her phone. Love, “eros” is soon in the air. But an old man, a failed merchant (Minas Hatzisavvas) has been moved to join the black-shirted thugs who gather for assaults on immigrant camps, including the abandoned jetliner where Farris (Barhom) hides out.
Giorgos, played by writer-director Papakaliatis, is a stressed-out middle manager, separated from his wife, whose inefficient Greek company is to be thinned out by a Swedish efficiency expert (Andrea Osvart). Of course, neither knows the other when they meet, argue in a bar and being young and beautiful, tumble into bed together.
And Maria (Maria Kavoyianni) is an over-60 housewife who still goes to the market even though she can’t afford anything there any more. She is just bi-lingual enough to aid a semi-retired German history professor (J.K. Simmons, twinkling and slinging an accent) who supposedly knows no Greek, but is in love with the culture and soon just as in love with her.
“I don’t understand a word, but I love your expressions!”
Papakaliatis uses these three inter-connected stories to explore the doomed romance of “Eros” and “Soul” from Greek myth, and the doomed romance of Greece with the European Union. There is tragedy, comedy and melodrama in its three acts.
The first story, titled “Boomerang” and named after an item Farris sells as a street vendor, is about how treating immigrants harshly will come back to haunt Greece.
And the middle tale, named after an anti-anxiety drug, is about the cruel and inhuman effects of “efficiency” on lives and cultures, both the inefficient and those who insist on efficiency in all things.
Maria harangues Sebastian (Simmons) about Germany’s high-handedness with her country, about the money “you owe us, starting two wars, destroying nations.” She does this in Greek so he won’t understand her fury, but confesses her growing infatuation in the same language, hiding her true feelings behind her mother tongue. Kavoyianni lets us see what Sebastian sees — longing, disappointment and woman helplessly falling in love.
It’s all rather obvious, but Papakaliatis manages a few surprises. Saving the sweetest story for last works beautifully, and there’s cleverness in the way he ties the tales together.
Papakaliatis, whose earlier film “What If?” also explored Greece in crisis, offers us a rare look inside Greece and from a Greek point of view, a nation straining to rediscover its footing in the world, wrestling with its inadequacies, raging about its place in history even as its electorate is largely ignorant of that history as it follows one incompetent populist or political demagogue after another over a cliff.
It’s naive to hope that “eros” might pull them out of the ashes of their civilization, but “Worlds Away” and its filmmaker are to be praised for having that hope in a time where that is increasingly in short supply.
Worlds Apart (2023)
Enas Allos Kosmos
Directed by: Cecilia Miniucchi
Starring: J.K. Simmons, Christoforos Papakaliatis, Andrea Osvárt, Maria Kavoyianni, Minas Hatzisavvas, Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos, Nikos Chatzopoulos, Dimitris Lignadis, Matthaios Korovesis
Screenplay by: Cecilia Miniucchi
Production Design by: Tonia Rightley
Film Editing by: Anne Goursaud
Art Direction by: Kim Pretti
Music by: Charlie Dobney
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: January 27, 2023
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