In her project Phantasmagorias of Longing: Cinematic World-Making at the Limits of Neoliberal Governmentality in Greece and Chile, Efthymiou examines contemporary Greek and Chilean fiction cinema through the lens of phantasmagoria, exploring how oneiric and spectral aesthetics respond to political disillusionment and suspended futurity under crisis neoliberalism. Emerging from distinct yet resonant histories of revolt constrained by austerity, indebtedness, and reactionary resurgence, recent films in both contexts deploy dreams, hauntings, and formal distortions to register exhaustion and impasse while sustaining longings for alternative ways of life.

Rather than treating Greece and Chile as equivalent cases, the project traces convergences in affect and cinematic form that reveal how collective aspirations persist beyond the limits of institutional politics. Methodologically, it advances an anthropology of fiction, approaching films as cultural texts that shape and articulate social imaginaries. By placing Greek cinema within a transnational Southern framework, the project contributes to film studies, anthropology, and Modern Greek Studies, offering phantasmagoria as a critical lens for understanding cinematic responses to crisis and the reconfiguration of political imagination. 

About Alkisti Efthymiou

Alkisti Efthymiou recently completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at Panteion University in Athens, where her research engaged with contemporary fiction cinema from Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in relation to neoliberal governmentality, authoritarian resurgence, and queer feminist mobilizations. As a Fulbright Scholar (2023–2024), she conducted part of her doctoral research at the Department of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a core researcher in the project Antigones: Bodies of Resistance in the Contemporary World, where she examined contemporary reimaginings of Antigone in Latin America, with a focus on Mexico and Chile.

Her work has been published in academic journals, edited volumes, and cultural magazines. Her most recent book, co-authored with Luciano Concheiro and published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), examines the reinterpretation of Mayan culture through the myth of Atlantis in the work of architects Robert Stacy-Judd and Manuel Amábilis. She is currently developing her first feature-length documentary, Your Delicate Friend. She is also a member of the Athens-based collective Nionia Films, which focuses on the circulation and exhibition of queer feminist cinema from Greece and the Balkans.