Wednesday 04:45

Stelios has run a jazz club in Athens for years. In the year of the crisis the debts have piled up and the club is about to go under. The Romanian loan shark who gave him the money says he will not wait any longer, and Stelios has thirty-two hours left. The middleman, an old friend of his, starts making him do dirty errands to clear the debt. His wife is thinking of leaving. Christmas is coming and the tree at home is still undecorated. Alexis Alexiou's film is set in the years of Greece's financial collapse and uses that crisis not as background but as the engine of the story; the chain of debt, interest and threat binds all the characters together. Stelios Mainas has the lead and does not draw the character as a victim; the more cornered the man gets, the harder he becomes. The story gives time as a countdown, which is what the title is for. A hundred and sixteen minutes.