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Grigoris Vardarinos studied at the Edinburgh College of Art on an Onassis Foundation scholarship, and holds a Master's degree in Film Directing. His thesis film, a black comedy short film entitled Talking Piranhas won over the international audience, making its first festival appearance with a nomination for the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award 2010 in Fiction and closing this cycle of presentations with the Gold Panda Award for Most Innovative Film 2011 at the Sichuan Film Festival in China.
In his new short film The Noir Project the artist breaks new ground, once more attempting and succeeding in combining film noir with live acting through animation. It is a fiction movie on the subject of domestic violence, which however raises hope and conveys a powerful social message of courage and persistence against the hardships of everydayness. As the director himself explains, "the reason for the production of this film was the fact that, despite the mass messages informing the public over the past years, the percentage of abused women remains very high in our country. Indicatively, the number of calls at SOS Helpline 15900 has reached 4,000 in only one year of operation, while one in three women is the victim of some form of abuse. Our film aims to help spread the word to support victims of abuse and help deal with violence against women."
In the film, 16-year-old Jacob decides to save his mother Helen from the claws of his drunken gambler father Manolis, who systematically abuses her. The story begins the night of the great escape, when Jacob succeeds in setting his carefully orchestrated plan in motion so that he and his mother can flee from his father's residence. That same evening Jacob has a fateful dream which encourages him and urges him to act. In this dream, the comic strip drawn by Jacob in his free time, entitled The Noir Project, comes alive and the characters representing the morbid reality he experiences symbolically foreshadow the imminent events... The film will premier at the Drama International Short Film Festival in September 2013.
Watch the trailer of The Noir Project.
