Renos Haralambids has represented in his career of twenty plus years, a new generation of Greek filmmakers, who have been making playful contemporary films, which blur the boundaries between real life and fiction, and which are made, as the title of his 1997 award-winning hit film, No Budget Story suggests, for almost no money at all. In this book, I speak not only as an American film scholar who has appreciated Greek cinema over the past fifty years, but as an award-winning screenwriter myself, who has gotten to know and appreciate Haralambidis personally over the past twenty years. I have thus been impressed not only with how his films have been received in Greece, but I have been present for enthusiastic audiences in Great Britain and across the United States.
I thus wish to speak about the importance of his first four feature films, No Budget Story (1997), Cheap Smokes (2000), The Heart of the Beast (2005) and Four Black Suits (2010) that make Renos, important not just to Greek cinema, but to cinema around this swiftly changing world.