A Small Queer Gem from Greece: Bearcave

Neon yellow, mint green, deep red: Annetta’s long fingernails glow in the brightest shades. In a small mountain village roughly in the middle of Greece, it doesn’t take much to stand out. The young woman loves drawing the eyes of others. The village feels too small for her, and she is determined to get out.

Very different is her best friend Argyro. She’s more unassuming, tends the family goats, and leaving the rural idyll behind isn’t on her radar. Yet she isn’t a backwoods type: Greek folk songs spill from her headphones, only to be joined by electronic beats as the music progresses. Tradition and modernity—she artfully blends the two poles.

Kissing in the Church

Annetta and Argyro are best friends, despite—or maybe because of—their differences. And even more: the two share a wild kiss, right there in a church. Is it merely a distraction? Who feels what here?

The Greek romance “Bearcave” stays pleasingly opaque for a long moment. Emotions are ambivalent, not always clear-cut—friendship, an affair, and a relationship can blend into one another, alternate, and fluctuate in intensity. And above all, they can be unequally distributed.

A Mysterious Mood

The Greek drama “Bearcave” is, on the surface, a mood piece about the two friends and their entanglements. When Annetta becomes pregnant, Argyro senses a shift, though it isn’t sure what exactly lies at the root of the change. Will the child anchor Annetta to the village, or push her toward a different life? Annetta’s drinking at a party looks suspiciously like a Long Island Iced Tea, she brushes a joint, she smokes. And yet she departs the village to move in with her partner, a plan that would have brought her closer to the city she always wanted. And Argyro? She keeps feeding the goats. But Annetta soon begins to doubt this new path.

The mountain landscape, green meadows, the sleepy village, a shimmering lake—these are, of course, enticing subjects for cinematographer Arsinoi Pilou, yet she does not glamorize them. The imagery is frequently hazed. Sometimes she stays close to her characters, almost trailing behind them as if reporting from the field. Other times she frames wide panoramas, gradually bringing the two women into focus and zooming in on them with a nearly voyeuristic lens. The soundscape, in particular, carries a tension. There’s something in the air, something unsettling.

Annetta’s Husband Is Hard to See

“Bearcave,” from directors Krysianna B. Papadakis and Stergios Dinopoulos, fuses the mystique of traditional Greek folk tales with a contemporary queer narrative into a coherent whole. You don’t even need to fully grasp the mythical heft of the titular cave—where the two friends hunt for answers—to sense the enigmatic atmosphere that surrounds it.

A Fearless Story
It’s astonishing how rarely queer-themed stories appear in Greek cinema. Lesbian or queer women are hard to find—and this, in a culture that gave Sappho her name, the ancient Greek lyric poet who is often linked to female-centered intimacy (TheColu.mn reported).
All the more heartening that the directing duo expanded their short film “Bearcave” into a feature, creating additional space for an authentic, fearless, and visually engaging narrative. It seems the bear cave had untapped potential that is now coming to light.