'Mila' (Apples, Greek: Μήλα), a drama film which explores selective memory, has been submitted by Greece for the best international feature category at the 93rd Academy Awards.
The Culture Ministry chose the specific film directed and produced by Christos Nikou, for "its good photography, ecumenism and its timeliness".
Amidst a worldwide pandemic that causes sudden amnesia, Aris finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help unclaimed patients build new identities. Prescribed daily tasks on cassette tapes so he can create new memories and document them on camera, Aris slides back into ordinary life, meeting Anna, a woman who is also in recovery.
The 93rd Academy Awards will take place on April 25, 2021.
*Watch the trailer here-
The film has proven eerily prescient as it arrives in the midst of a real-world pandemic. Calling it “a testament to the strength of this lonely and aloof tragicomedy’s central allegory that it adapts so well to our pear-shaped times.s,” Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge wrote in his review: “What might have been the latest oddity of the Greek Weird Wave — or else a surreal collection of live-action “The Far Side” cartoons — instead feels soulfully relevant as reality aligns with the speculative world Nikou imagined."
“It is a very strange coincidence that I ended up making a film about a pandemic only months before the world went into lockdown,” Nikou told Variety after the announcement by Greece’s Ministry of Culture.
“Of course, the world and the pandemic we created for ‘Apples,’ which causes people to lose their memories, is very different from what is happening now. But there are some similarities that the audience will recognize, as ‘Apples’ deals with isolation, loss, and somehow uncertainty about the future, and these issues have additional meanings nowadays. We tried, though, to give an optimistic approach to this topic," he added.