Feature Narrative Competition | Greece, Bulgaria, France | Greek, Russian, with Arabic subtitles | 111 min
After making Variety’s “Ten Euro Directors to Watch” list in 2013, director Elina Psykou releases her second feature, Son of Sofia, where she explores the separating line between childhood and and adolescence, winning the Best International Narrative Feature award at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
After two years of being entirely separated from his mother, Misha returns to Greece to live with her and the elderly man she claims she had been working for, who we soon discover has become her husband. It is 2004, and the Olympic Games are taking place in Athens. Misha feels Russian to the core, and struggles with feelings of alienation in this unfamiliar world he finds himself in, as his stepfather overwhelms him with stories of Greek history and mythology that he recounts with pride. Desperate to escape, Misha retreats into a fantastical dream landscape every night, where we see him become a giant bear, roaming with a freedom he doesn’t find in the morning. He also befriends a teenage gigolo he meets on a film set with his stepfather, and becomes closer to him than anyone else.
Like the imaginary bear in Misha’s dreams, we make our way inside his psyche as he grapples with feelings of loneliness, far from the country he calls home, attempting to recreate ties with his mother. Son of Sofia is a unique coming-of-age story, crafted with extraordinary sensitivity, about those years where we feel uneasy in the world, when
even those closest to us feel like strangers.
Elina Psykou Son of Sofia is Elina Psykou’s second feature. Her debut, The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013 and, later that same year, Psykou was named one of the 10 European directors to watch by “Variety”.
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