FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies ISSUE 3, October 2015 87 FILM REVIEW Miss Violence (2013) by Alexandros Avranas Marios Psarras Independent Scholar Halfway through Alexandros Avranasǯs Miss Violence (2013), a wide shot shows the family in the living room eating pizza and watching TV under the inconspicuous gaze of the patriarch (Themis Panou) who is seating on an armchair at the right corner of the frame. A modern pop hit starts playing on the television and Alkmini (Kalliopi Zontanou), the youngest member of the family, stands up and starts dancing for the camera, the latterǯs lens suggestively merging with the TV screen. Suddenly, the viewer is confronted with a rather confusing image as the little girl, who is apparently mimicking the highly provocative dance moves screened in the music video, becomes disturbingly objectified, emerging, indeed, as a sexualized spectacle herself. In narrative terms, this scene anticipates the girlǯs entrance into the vicious circle of sexual abuse and prostitution, in which the patriarch condemns the familyǯs female members; something which will be horrifyingly verified towards the end of the film. The scene might also be read as an acerbic comment on the highly sexualized visual culture to which young children are exposed on a daily basis and which viciously privileges and propels particular forms of gender and sexual embodiment that in turn become intimate processes of identity formation, consolidating and reproducing hegemonic – and intrinsically patriarchal – notions of gender appropriateness and physical normalcy. However, one cannot overlook the fact that the scene encapsulates an ethically problematic spectacle, verging on exploitation and begging the question of authorial responsibility and the limits of the representable. For, Avranasǯs film is as much an ethical project, focusing on a trenchant interrogation of the ethics of patriarchy, as it is an ethically problematic one, insofar as the line between critique and sensationalism seems at times to dissipate. Miss Violence is a cruel tale of sexual abuse, incest and pedophilia, of gendered, sexualized and also self- inflicted violence, crucially a litmus test on patriarchal violence. Nevertheless,