Greek Tragedy
As a filmmaker, Oscar winner Jessica Yu is smart, adventurous, and utterly fearless. You’d have to be to make a talking-head documentary inspired by the 5th century B.C. playwright Euripides (an idea proposed by the Carr Foundation) and then decide to outfit key scenes with wooden rod puppets speaking ancient Greek. But her new film, Protagonist, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and gets a theatrical release November 30 from IFC Films, is not high-concept marionette theater, it’s a fascinating investigation of what drives passionate people to acts of radical self-negation—and of […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 28, 2007