Manolis Mavromatakis won the Best Actor Award at the Nashville Film Festival for his performance in the Greek film The Enemy Within.
Yet neither the Greek actor nor the director of the movie George Tsemberopoulos were able to travel to Nashville due to financial circumstances.
In the film, Mavromatakis plays the role of a 48-year-old family man, Kostas Stasinos, who lives a peaceful life with his wife Rania and his two children, Andreas and Louisa, in a quiet neighborhood in Athens, Greece.
In Tsemberopoulos’ nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the imagined expectations of others.
Yorgos Tsemberopoulos was born in Athens, studied economics in Greece and film at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he lived for six years directing documentaries, short films and theatre. The Enemy Within is his fifth feature.
Nashville has been known for organising one of the most important independent film festivals worldwide for 45 years now.