Columbia, 2007, 85 min
Direction: Spiros Stathoulopoulos
Cast: Melida Urquia, Daniel Paez, Hugo Pereira, Alberto Sornoza
Awards: Premio Citta di Roma – Arcobaleno di Latino 2007, Audience Award, Best Actor (Alberto Sornoza), FIPRESCI Prize, Silver Alexander, 2007 Thessaloniki Film Festival; nominations: Golden Alexander, 2007 Thessaloniki Film Festival
Selection: Exit Point
Debut movie made by Greek-Columbian director Spiros Stathoulopoulos, called PVC-1, which managed to spark strong reaction in 60th International Film Festival in Cannes, win Premio Citta di Roma - Arcobaleno di Latino 2007, and draw attention of one of the greatest Hollywood talent agencies The Endeavor Talent Agency, is going to be shown in Cinema City Festival, in International Exit Point Selection.
After initial projections, the movie continued with winning. So, in International Film Festival in Thessalonica it won a special jury award Silver Alexander, the audience award, the award in the category of best film actor - Alberto Sornoza, as well as the prestigious award FIPRESCI.
Through PVC-1, Stathoulopoulos presents us a disturbing story of inhuman violence to a Columbian family resulting from a bizarre terrorist act. Due to a failure to pay rent, the mother is put a bomb around her neck. Under the pressure of mental and physical torture, the desperate mother and her family try to find the way out from the unbearable situation. The movie is based on a true story that happened to an innocent Columbian family in 2000.
The cast is made of both professional actors and amateurs who went through a three-month training to achieve a level of professional awareness towards the camera position during the filming. The goal was to follow the real time flow, which made the story very real and dramatic. The producers’ team originally planned that precise filming of the situation should ensure expected tension of the film drama, with the accent on the phenomenon of terrorism as a world problem. However, the used method produced extraordinary cinematography results, making this act of film art one of the most noticeable movies of today.
Spiros Stathoulopoulos was born in Thessalonica, Greece. Already as a boy he showed a great interest for film. When he was fourteen, seven years after his family moved from Greece to Columbia, he won his first award for a short video called Dimension. In his eighteen, he served the army in Greece. This experience shaped a new vision that got its final form in a short video Necropolis. In his twenty-three, he worked on the editing for Habitos Sucios movie directed by Carlosa Palaua. After moving to New York, where he finished his faculty and founded his production company – Cosmocrator Cinema, Stathoulopoulos managed to finish his first movie PVC-1, in the year of twenty-nine.