Greece
is known for its ancient ruins, but they produce modern ones too. This ghostly
abandoned airport is the perfect setting for some post-apocalyptic drama.
However, it wasn’t so long ago it was repurposed as a refugee camp. Much of the
detritus is still strewn about, adding to the wasteland-like atmosphere in
Yorgos Zois’s thirty-minute short film, Third
Kind (trailer
here),
which screens as part of the 2018 Denver Film Festival.
Three
archaeologists have travelled across space and time to track the source of a
mysterious transmission. It has been years since the Earth was inhabited, or so
they assumed. However, there may still be a survivor left amongst the rubble.
Surveying the ghostly site is a surreal process, but undeniably cinematic.
Still, it never fully obscures the obvious and awkward question: what sort of
clash of civilizations could bring about the almost complete extinction of life
of Earth? A mere lack of charity certainly cannot account for the future state
of affairs.
By
the way, that transmission is a repeated five note musical pattern. The first
four will sound gosh darn familiar—or they should. That title is part of an
extended homage to Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, but the final note of the classic five-tone
theme has been altered—perhaps for legal reasons. Nevertheless, whenever the
5-tone figure plays, it sounds distractingly “wrong,” like someone perversely
keeps hitting the wrong key.
