Christos Passalis makes his feature directorial debut with "Silence 6-9," an eerie, melancholy love story that plays in competition this week at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. He previously made his breakthrough with a debut role in the movie that launched the Greek Weird Wave and rose to prominence as one of his nation's most accomplished theatre actors and directors.

At the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Passalis' first film made its world premiere in the Crystal Globe category. Variety's Jessica Kiang lauded Passalis' "absorbing, weird, retro-futurist love story" as a "beautifully produced solo debut" there.
"Passalis' solo directorial debut eventually separates itself by moving to a more human and humane place," she wrote. "After a beginning unmistakably set deep inside the familiarly bizarro, alien realms of the Greek Weird Wave aesthetic, she moves to a more human and humane place."

A stranger arrives in a strange place one night as the movie opens. He comes into a mystery woman as he strolls down a barren street lit only by sodium streetlights. She is another new arrival and the only other person staying at the abandoned hotel, which is being watched over by two frightening chambermaids.

The narrative becomes much odd. The town's residents have inexplicably vanished, leaving behind messages on analogue cassette cassettes that their loved ones are urgently searching for. Aris (Passalis) has been recruited to repair the antenna towers that pick up these messages. In front of an audience of bereaved husbands and lovers who are reluctant to let go of the deceased, Anna, played by Greek screen stalwart Angeliki Papoulia, dances with the doubles of vanished local ladies.

The movie "Silence 6-9," despite its strange extras, is about love, loss, and sadness as well as the common desire to hang on and the dread of letting go. The town's fury against the system is expressed in an impassioned call for "No More Cassettes," even as deeper sentiments develop between the recently arrived couple who are witness to these unusual events and the inconsolable males who are unceasingly caught in a cycle of anguish and longing.
"Fear and love are the two powers. Love, not courage, is the antithesis of fear, according to Passalis. "At its core, the movie is about a society that is extremely frightened. People vanish. Some people wish to recall. Some people must forget. The culture is one of fear. Love is the only way to overcome this fear.

Passalis and Papoulia rejoin in "Silence 6-9," the sequel to Yorgos Lanthimos' 2009 Cannes hit "Dogtooth," which is widely regarded as having helped launch the Greek Weird Wave. Passalis, a seasoned stage actor and director, has repeatedly worked with Syllas Tzoumerkas on projects like "Homeland" and "The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea." The City and the City, a hybrid feature film, was co-directed by the two and had its world premiere this year in the Encounters competitive section of the Berlin Film Festival.

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