Premiering at Venice Film Festival to strong acclaim back in 2020, Christos Nikou’s Apples would go on to become Greece’s official Oscar entry and now, at long last, the drama about an amnesia pandemic will get a release this summer from Cohen Media Group. The director has also been busy in the meantime, casting Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed in his English-language debut Fingernails, a surreal sci-fi love story set in a world where a test can measure if couples are truly in love. When Buckley’s character is skeptical of the positive result she’s received with her longtime partner, so she starts working in a love institute as an assistant to Trevor (Ahmed), a mysterious, dedicated instructor.
As for Apples, Eli Friedberg said in his review, “[the film] is set in a world where digital technology seems not to exist, yet the psychic imprint of the digital age hangs heavy over first-time director Christos Nikou’s sparse absurdist dramedy. In an alternate-universe Greece, people are falling victim to a pandemic of sudden-onset Memento syndrome: total, crippling amnesia that befalls ordinary adults seemingly at random, necessitating elaborate state-run medical programs for the mnemonically impaired. Of particular concern to such programs are “unclaimed” amnesiacs, patients who fail to be identified by friends or family members and thus become wards of the state, who must be gradually rehabilitated into society and construct new identities from scratch.”
Watch the trailer below.
Apples opens on June 24, 2022.