A dystopian world of color and music created from the poetry of Dinos Christianopoulos and Maria Tataraki interwoven within the backdrop of a futuristic Athens, which faces modern political turmoil due to a malfunction within the android population. 

Red city is about an alternative present - or near future - where people have been so alienated from each other that they start using androids to keep them company. It is a film about all authority relationships. Master and slave, teacher and student, father and son, etc. In this context, the android concept is used as mere a metaphor for a major issue of human nature. 

The film focuses on Antoine, an android lady escort, and its developer. Though one is a machine, whereas the other is a human, they both have a problem with authority, they are following their own individual paths towards self knowledge, both develop feelings along the way, and they become more human at the end. Neither becomes happy - Red City isn’t a story with a happy ending - but they do become freer and wiser. Their actions affect and are affected by many other characters actions, directly or indirectly. 

This web of interactions builds up a revolution within Red City. A revolution of androids against their makers and against their owners. A revolution that preexisted in the consciousness of all androids and some humans too, but never reached the surface through communal action.

Red City is one of the first Greek films shot entirely with a Canon DSLR camera. Its making process was an uncompromising experimentation. Boundaries were pushed, conventions were questioned, improvisations flourished into entire sequences; and what started out as a short film finally evolved into a full blown feature. Red City was created in a current period of great sociopolitical turmoil. In 2010 - 2012, Greece, in particular the city of Athens, underwent a great amount of change; the streets were filled with angry citizens, willing prostitutes, homeless people, and violent cops. All this imagery inspired the director, Manos Cizek, to create the fictional world of Red City. Many of the scenes in the film are compiled from direct live footage of the riots; the conflicts, the fires, and widowed alleys. Red City is both metaphorically and literally a city on fire. Using only organic sources of lighting – without any CGI – we were able to extract ‘what was already there’, rather than construct an artificially projected reality.

Red City deviates from traditional film making techniques in Greece. It is a paradigm shift, due to its prismatic approach to its subject. All aspects of the story telling process were on equal footing, blended into an overall work in progress that spontaneously emerged out of the sociopolitical condition of Greece, as well as the poetry that transcends this condition into a collective ideal. This is a new way of film making, that requires from directors and cinematographers to boldly adapt to their natural environment - rather than forcing the environment to adapt them - by making themselves not just storytellers, but organic parts of an entire process and capture life as it is happening. This is also why many of the scenes in Red City have been shot with natural lighting, and many of the actors’ performances were improvisations.

The technological breakthrough of the Canon DSLR cameras allowed film makers to be a lot more flexible and capture the inner pace of events with the minimum amount of external artificial intervention. Red City would have been impossible without these cameras, and is probably the most integrated and ambitious facet of this movement so far.