Apples

Apples (Μήλα, 2021) is a Greek tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM. A strange epidemic is spreading through the city: people lose their memory without warning, all at once. One unnamed man is found asleep on a bus with no ID, and no one ever comes to claim him.

At the clinic they tell him plainly that the memory won't come back. Instead there's a program — each day the patient receives a cassette with another task a "normal" person should do (make a friend, go to a party, sleep with someone) and documents it on a Polaroid, stitching together a life out of snapshots. Aris Servetalis plays him almost without expression, which somehow makes the man more affecting, not less. He keeps buying apples by the bag, because someone told him they're good for the memory.

This is the debut of Christos Nikou, once an assistant to Yorgos Lanthimos, and it carries the dry absurdity and quiet melancholy of the Greek Weird Wave. The film was Greece's submission for the Academy Awards. Slow, odd and unexpectedly tender, it asks whether we are simply the things we never managed to forget. One for patient arthouse viewers. Stream Apples (2021) online on iFILM.