CENTAURS – Stella Michael’s Mythic Lens on Modern Toxicity
Drawing from ancient myth and contemporary experience, Greek filmmaker Stella Michael confronts the uneasy truth that love and destruction often share the same language. Greek writer and director Stella Michael presents her new short film Centaurs, a 15-minute psychological drama that will have its world premiere on 6 February at the Close-Up Film Centre in London. Shot in London and created by an international UK-based team, the film continues Michael’s distinctive exploration of intimacy, power, and inherited emotional patterns.
Set over the course of a single evening, Centaurs unfolds across three parallel celebrations: a daughter’s birthday, the signing of a lucrative business contract, and a marriage proposal. As rituals of joy progress, a darker undercurrent begins to surface. Toxicity quietly infiltrates a mother–daughter bond, a CEO–employee relationship, and a couple on the brink of collapse. What begins as celebration gradually transforms into confrontation, culminating in a surreal and grotesque banquet where intimacy is consumed by greed and control.
The film draws inspiration from the Greek myth of Nessus, using it as a metaphor for how harm can disguise itself as devotion, and how victims may unconsciously replicate the behaviours that once wounded them.
Michael does not offer easy resolutions. Instead, Centaurs poses a stark question: how difficult is it to break free from toxic relationships — and what does it cost to do so? Michael’s Greek heritage subtly informs the film’s symbolic language and emotional intensity.
This connection is deepened through the original score by acclaimed Greek composer Giorgos Michas, whose music amplifies the film’s psychological and mythic dimensions. The cast includes Marie Ann Watson, Hannah Harris, Patroklos Sesis, Mike Kelson, Clarisse Zamba, Jonathan Cobb, and Sinead Long.
Centaurs will begin its international festival journey from March onwards.
