Tonia Marketaki's John the Violent (1973) screens at The Garden Cinema on Thursday 22 October 2026, introduced by the film lecturer Tonia Kazakopoulou.
Tonia Marketaki was born in Piraeus and grew up in Zografou in Athens. She finished her first short film in the year the Colonels took power and was imprisoned by the new regime for it, left the country, and returned in 1971. John the Violent, which she wrote, directed and produced herself, came two years later and was her first feature. She remains one of the very few women to have made a major film in Greece before the dictatorship ended.
The film opens on a woman stabbed to death on a deserted Athens street and then declines to be about the crime. What it examines instead is how the press builds a narrative around a confessed murderer and what that narrative does to the truth underneath it, which was an unusually dangerous subject to take up in 1973. At three hours it is demanding and formally inventive, and it has only recently begun to be placed where it belongs in world cinema.
The Garden Cinema screens it on Thursday 22 October 2026 at 7.15pm, introduced by the film lecturer Tonia Kazakopoulou. It follows Stella in the cinema’s Greek Salad strand by design, the two read as a pair on female desire and the conventions ranged against it. Manolis Logiadis, Mika Flora and Vangelis Kazan lead the cast, and the film was first released in Athens on 29 September 1973.