It is a cinematic breakthrough that perhaps could only come from the monk.  Michael Manta’s Receta expands the vocabulary of film to fold the personal journey into the universal quest for transcendence.

Mike Mantas enacts his inner monk on a spiritual journey in his “Receta”.

While this is no small feat, the surprise is how it achieves this quantum leap into the timeless; in real time by way of interweaving the making of homemade cheese into political documentary about his ancestral Greece during the violent uprisings anticipating the Trump era of nationalist revolutions.

As writer, director and producer of his own mythology transforming his identity from queer monk to avant-garde Greek-Canadian filmmaker, Mike Mantas‘ layered interweaving of autobiographical…

…the mythical…

…documentary of the Greek uprising…

…and political narrative of ego repression…

…absorbing the the long-repressed Shadow…

…by means of a multicultural tapestry of Queer identity on a sea journey…

…to absorb the transgender Aquarian icon…

…is coded with the newly arising icon of the hieros gamos via the extraordinary face of Mina Orfanou as the Goddess Eurynome.

Evoking the hero’s journey of our time of dislocation, Mantas, a trained actor, self-performs the marriage of polarities (masculine and feminine)… ….by means of mastering a Greek recipe for cheese created in real time…

Diametrically in opposition to the externalization of the “male gaze” …

…coded through the killer stare of the nude female store mannequins…

…melds symbol and gesture to herald a 360 perspective symbolized by the trangender figure holding a utility geometry of holism: an umbrella.

The outward projection of the psyche’s inner struggle for union takes place through the eye of Mantas’ vintage camera in which the analog camera serves as recurring motif…

…for the physicality of filmmaking in which the gesture with the camera is an apparatus of personal excavation…

… a metaphor of Heideggerian Being in which interior is reflected in the exterior…

Such a richly multilayered narrative texture utilising the Shadow as container for the embrace of the iternal feminine is new to cinema.

“Receta” has a metal lock box as metahpor of the Philosopher’s Stone storing the coded psyche.

Upsetting the hierarchical linear time measured in quantity, Mantas infuses kairos — the unexpected moment of the quantum leap– into film as a measure of the qualitative…

Melding analog and digital by means of the symbolic and performative, Receta constructs the organic source of film, celluloid, into the Mobius strip as it overcomes the binary dualism of the subjective/objective…

Receta proclaims a bold new era of cinema marrying subjective/objective through the right and left hemispheres of the brain.  By challenging the viewer as participant in the quest for unity, the real/surreal seamlessly blend personal and universal narrative..

The Third Eye is among the rich iconography in “Receta” for the paradigm leap into the Third.

Mantas’ Greek birthname is Chronopoulos.  Not surprisingly, this enterprising filmmaker has made his destiny in digging so deep as to establish the visual language of a new art for(u)m at the intersection of Chronos and Kairos…

…by means of opening new Doors of Perception.

While making unconventional demands for a whole brain participation to absorb multidimensional narrative, the rewards of learning Mike Mantas’ Receta are well worth the effort.