Musical meets crime drama in a colorful Athens set story of forgotten misfits, Broadway. Following a strong festival run including Rotterdam, San Francisco Indie FF, & more, director Christos Massalas’s Broadway hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles this weekend followed by a digital and DVD release on May 16 from Dark Star Pictures. The latest acclaimed addition to Greek New Wave (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), the film tells of a group of four young street performers and pickpockets in modern Athens who find an unexpected refuge in the “Broadway Stoa”, an abandoned entertainment complex. The balance of their makeshift family will be upset when a former team member is released from prison.
Discussing the movie, Director and actor Christos Massalas shares, ‘Making a film is like dreaming with your eyes open. And in films, like in dreams, you connect dots that were unconnected before and new shapes emerge. These shapes carry the mysterious essence of the world – your world, at least. It was 7 years ago that the dream of “Broadway” began. The colors were saturated and the feelings were sometimes red, sometimes blue and sometimes they smelled of gasoline. There were dancers, there were thieves and Athens was a sunlit stage where monuments of the 20th century stood glorious and rusty. The world of “Broadway” started building itself in my head, little by little, through the years. I went on to make short films in the meantime and, along the way, I met the people who would become the invaluable clan of “Broadway”– in front of the camera and behind. In these 7 years that have passed since that first daydream, the world has taken so many strange turns; and along with it, our collective fantasies kept palpitating in search of new rhythms, new rhymes, old worlds, and urban myths for the days to come. And just like with urban myths, “Broadway” is as true as you want it to be. If you believe it, you might see the marquees lighting up one after the other. And maybe this time, you will be the star.
Christos Massalas co-stars and directs. Elsa Lekakou, Foivos Papadopoulos, Stathis Apostolou, Rafael Papad, and Salim Talbi star.
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