Film

Directed by the producer of Un Chant d’amour, Thanos and Despina was completed just as a military junta took power in Greece, and was later banned in its home country. “This tragic allegory of modern Greece tells the story of an incredibly beautiful young girl and a peasant boy in revolt against the stultifying, poverty-stricken oppression of village life with its corrupt moral codes,” the Grove Press Film Division’s 1970 catalog stated. “Thanos and Despina translates the implacable ferocity of ancient Greek tragedy into relevant modern terms.”

French literary rebel Jean Genet’s landmark of queer cinema was suppressed for decades for its depiction of a prison as a hothouse of homosexual desire. Rosset distributed Genet’s sexually explicit film in defiance of obscenity laws.