SXSW London 2026: The Boy with the Light-Blue Eyes

Peter (Giorgos Karidis) lives in a superstitious mountain village in Thanasis Neofotistos’s spellbinding directorial debut, The Boy with the Light-Blue Eyes. The small community is headed by Peter’s domineering grandmother, Margarita (a scene-stealing Sofia Filippidou), who passionately warns the villagers of “the evil eye” and insists that Peter wear goggles to protect his photosensitive eyes from the light. When tragedy strikes, Peter is forced to confront the truth about his eyes as he tries to escape the suffocating environment with his best friend Aemon (Pablo Soto). What follows is a darkly comedic and surreal allegory of otherness that’s inspired by Neofotistos’s own experiences growing up as a gay man in a conservative Greek household. Despite the feature’s intoxicating atmosphere and arresting visuals, the coming-of-age story at its core is a familiar one.

The village is a peculiar and fascinating place that exists outside of time. The residents’ homes and outfits suggest the film is set during the early 1900s, but the existence of a much-maligned wind turbine looming over the fog-covered swamp places it firmly in the present. This strangeness extends to the villagers’ behaviour. Despite being a teenager, Peter acts like a much younger child and shares an uncomfortably close relationship with his overbearing mother (Syrmo Keke). Even weirder, the village holds a sacred reverence for nylon.

Evocative sound design from Valia Tserou heightens the bizarreness of Peter’s world, mixing ominous rumbles with piercing whistles and the foreboding swooshing of the unseen turbine. Infrequent bursts of vibrant blue from the eponymous eyes likewise contrast sharply against a muted colour palette to inject moments of beguiling wonder into the protagonist’s journey.

As visually rich and imaginatively compelling as this feature is, all the way up to its morbid climax, the narrative is a well-worn one. Its central metaphors and themes are established tropes which Neofotistos and co-writer Grigoris Skarakis don’t do anything particularly new with. While they attempt to lend some ambiguity to the truth behind Peter’s eyes, these implications aren’t explored in a substantial enough way to make any meaningful difference.

The Boy With Light-Blue Eyes is a brilliantly weird slice of surreal cinema that will appeal to fans of Yorgos Lanthimos and David Lynch. Although Neofotistos brings an abundance of style and creativity to his feature debut, the script plays things safe by sticking to familiar territory.