Fellow Field: Κινούμενη είκονα

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

“You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended.”

— Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

Like many artists, Eirini Vianelli did not follow a straight path to her destination. Today, she is an experimental animator whose projects include producing her own films, collaborating with theatrical pieces and operas, and even sprinkling in commercial jobs to support her vibrant artistic practice. But when she thinks back to herself as a child, she admits none of this would have seemed then like even a faint possibility: “25 years ago, I loved watching animated movies, but I had no idea that animation could be used in so many different ways. I never saw it in theatres and operas like today. I had no idea the internet was coming and that there would be such a need for content. Really, I had no idea what the future would hold — I still don’t, but now I find that exciting.” Along her once uncertain path lay many roads not taken and just as many failures that eventually, even unexpectedly, revealed the way forward. Animated films are often made up of just such stories: a plucky character setting out into the world to find themselves, facing troubles and trials along the way, before they are granted some deeper wisdom and a happy ending. I imagine that Eirini, all smiles and with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, would make a great heroine for exactly this kind of tale. But of course, she knows that the life of the artist is not as simple as that. Still, somehow, for the time being, she has made it work.

From an early age, Eirini loved to draw; while growing up, her father was a film director. In retrospect, the connecting bridge between these two passions lay right in front of her — animation! — but such clarity remained a long way off. First, Eirini went to London to study graphic design, a profession she would never practice. Fortunately, her degree program was open-minded and amenable to different ways of engaging with the field. In her final year, for example, she made a film. The family business beckoned. Back in Athens, she took up work in the industry, taking any and every kind of role she could find: production assistant, casting director, location scout, director’s assistant. Film seemed to be the answer and her desire to make a career of it took her to a summer directing program at New York University. She arrived filled with expectations of where the experience would lead.

She pauses here, and with the tense vividness of a good storyteller, brings me back. “I can still remember the feeling of an entire crew looking at me for direction, depending on me, the collected weight of expectation and responsibility. I ended up shooting a short film in 20 minutes.” She continues, able to laugh about it now, “No, not a 20-minute film: after gathering my team, I began to have an awful feeling that I was wasting everyone’s Saturday. So, just 20 minutes after we began, I called it a day; the shoot was over and I sent everyone home.” A short time later, and well before the summer course had ended, Eirini went home, feeling like a failure. But she had learned an invaluable lesson: she needed to work on her own.

Her next adventure was a self-published children’s book. Illustrating was peaceful, solitary, enjoyable even. But she soon realized that she couldn’t do everything on her own. For one thing, she is a horrible business person: this she discovered after going door-to-door to Athens’ bookstores, carrying her work on her shoulder. At one shop, for example, they were hesitating between buying five or ten books from her. She compromised by selling five and giving them two for free. Math, she noted, is also not a strong suit.

But producing the book brought her back to drawing, and then illustration, and quickly to animation. After making a music video for a friend, something seemed to click. The odd little art form seemed to have it all: combining drawing with film, a hand-made, even crafted element with more technical and precise work. Animation can be carried out simply, in two-dimensions, but Eirini frequently works with objects, crossing the line between sculpture and installation. “I began watching YouTube videos to get better, learning everything I could. But I knew I had to go further.” Again, she struck out into the world, this time for a masters degree in experimental animation from CalArts, in Los Angeles. “The school was everything I could have asked for: patient, generous, welcoming — and filled with fellow obsessives. There I found a community and even more, a feeling that I had finally found my way.” Eirini’s creative desires continue to grow and evolve, but animation has proved to be a medium adaptable to these changes, giving her the space to explore and push herself.

Her time in Los Angeles was not without its challenges though. While the first year passed idyllically — learning, talking, animating, collaborating, and with the promise of being able to surf on the Pacific any time she wanted — soon the pressure began to mount. She had come all the way from Athens to make an animated film and so as her studies drew to an end, she was driven by one thought, “It has to be perfect.” This graduation project, a short film titled Icebergs (that has gone on to win several awards at film festivals around the world), explores many themes, one of which is how we tend to take things too seriously. For Eirini, this lesson was hard-won: “Even though I was trying to convey this message, I myself took the production of the film way too seriously. After one particularly rough day of editing, I woke up to discover that I had lost hearing in one ear. I went to several doctors and no one could give me a definitive answer. In fact, I still don’t know what caused it [and her hearing still hasn’t returned]. But all of this was a shocking reminder: ‘It’s just an animated film. Relax.’ When you’re in the midst of a project, you feel it’s so important that it becomes the whole world. When it starts to go wrong, it’s like a bomb ticking down to zero. I think we would all benefit from getting a little bit of distance from our own work.”

Perhaps Eirini has learned to take some distance for another reason: she is not the only creative force behind her projects. Although she feels best when working alone, she revealed to me that she does have collaborators: the puppets that animate her films. She explains further, “First, I have a story in my head [or one she has read — Raymond Carver, for example, who opens this essay]. Then, I produce a drawing of the imagined world, one-to-one in scale with the resulting film set. After all, when I build my miniature scenes, everything has to be the right size. For example, if the door is too small for the puppet, the character won’t be able to fit into the room and I won’t be able to make an animation. But for all of my preparation, it’s only when I start physically crafting my characters that they become something else entirely.”

Some of this surprise results from the fact that Eirini is, self-admittedly, not a good sculptor. But she has turned this weakness into a strength, as her willingness to accept the difference between what she imagines and what she can actually produce leads, unexpectedly, to new ideas. As her puppets come into being, they themselves seem to have a say in how they will move, speak, and act in the scenes. Even their materiality pushes her in unexpected directions. For example, paper towel is too absorbent of the colored dyes, but when dipped in latex, it takes on the look she needs. But then the latexed paper only allows her to construct certain kinds of eyes, other kinds of mouths. Each puppet walks in a particular way, lifts their arms like so. All of these limitations reveal how each character will express themselves and their emotions. Eirini’s puppets are mysterious beings, filled with surprises, revealing themselves as part of her collective creative process. Fitting, then, that while most of the sets are thrown away after production, Eirini keeps many of her puppets — they are the objects from which her art emerges.

Eirini’s relationship to these puppets is also expressed through the themes of her work. As the title Icebergs indicates, Eirini believes we only ever see the tip of other people’s lived realities, the true ways they experience the world. Even our own innermost feelings are imperfectly accessible to us. But watching a puppet helps us realize these gaps. As she tells me, “When we see a puppet or something drawn, we distance ourselves from it. This helps us have a more sympathetic eye to them. It’s like how we are with children. Think about how understanding we are with them: if a baby is fussy, we really try to understand it, we give it so many excuses. But when a driver cuts us off, our first reaction is ‘Fuck them.’

Eirini’s interest in children must go back some time, since she wrote her first children’s book years ago. But it has deepened today, as she is now a proud mother. Thanks to her new role, she lately finds herself spending hours at the playground. But as ever, she draws creativity from what’s in front of her. In this case, observing young children at play has given her a new studio in which to gather material. She carefully notes her observations, especially the moments when children act like grownups (and grownups like kids). This frequent inversion will likely form the basis of her next film.

In the meantime, as Eirini gets to know her daughter better (another character who will surely surprise her), she continues to explore herself and her practice. She admits, “I don’t know anything about myself. Socrates’ words ‘Know thyself’ — easier said than done! Every time I think to myself, ‘I’ve got this, I’ve got it all figured out,’ is the exact moment when I realize how much is out of my control.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

At the start of one of Athens’ major summer exhibitions — “The Same River Twice,” co-organized by The New Museum and DESTE and held at the Benaki Museum — we find a beautiful short film by the artist Neritan Zinxhiria. Amidst a wide range of contemporary art pieces, ranging from the plainly documentary to the utterly abstract, Neritan’s film is something else entirely: direct, emotional, and straight from the heart. A Country of Two tells the love story of Neritan’s parents and how their personal journey intertwined with the fall of Albania’s Communist regime in 1990. As Neritan describes, “My parents, Shpetim and Fatbardha, walked the distance from Albania to Greece to live their love.” Twenty-five years later, Neritan reversed the journey, travelling from his adopted home of Greece back to his birthplace, and documented what he saw along the way. In the film, Neritan’s parents narrate their own story while a variety of images appear on the screen: found footage from 1990s Athens, home videos from Neritan’s youth, abstract shots of nature collected on the road between the two countries. Neritan’s retelling of his parents’ story has two anchor points: an opening scene where Neritan’s parents enter a completely empty cinema and take their places to take in the film which will follow, and a closing scene where we see his two parents once more, still seated, but now in close-up. As they face the screen and in turn us, we become the very images that engross them.

It is in this moment that Neritan’s deep — primal, really — love for cinema reveals itself. When I first met with Neritan for our interview, I discovered how easy it was to be taken in by his charisma and storytelling finesse. Still, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Can someone truly feel this passionately about their work? What’s the line between self-belief and self-importance?” Further, his own biography and artistic development felt almost too, well, cinematic. But after seeing A Country for Two, I realized that when Neritan says he was born and raised in the cinema, he means it. And indeed, a cinematic sense of optimism, wonder, and mystery pervades all of his work. The next time any of us pauses to appreciate any work of film, we should remember Neritan’s two parents sitting in an empty cinema and talking about the combined power of stories and love. For ultimately, Neritan believes this what the movies are all about.

***

Neritan’s film also conveys a more prosaic fact but one that is equally important to understanding the artist’s work — his own journey to Greece was long, and continues to this day. Neritan was born in Albania and moved to Greece with his parents shortly thereafter. He came at such a young age that he never had occasion to consider himself a foreigner until the age of five or six. It was only then, when another wave of Albanian immigrants joined him in his classroom, that his difference was made manifest. On the first day of school, the teacher presented the new students to the class and said, “Since they can’t speak Greek, we must all be patient with them.” But Neritan, who spoke Albanian at home with his parents and sister, had no problem understanding these “foreigners.” As he told me, “That’s when I realized that I was in-between, both Albanian and Greek, but also not fully either.”

Clear-cut binaries have never interested Neritan, though. Growing up, he reveled in his family’s dispersed roots: Egypt, France, Turkey and beyond. His father loved Egyptian-Arabian music. Neritan remembers learning about Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman Pasha of Albanian descent who ruled over Egypt for nearly half a century. As he grew older, Neritan became keen to discover more sights and sounds, to open himself up to these seemingly distant worlds. Instead, he was faced with the pressure of answering the much narrower question, “How do you identify?” Indeed, from his very first interview with journalists, Neritan confronted how even in the creative fields, people had a fetish for hearing him declare a single identity. This desire for categorization manifested itself again during the refugee crisis in 2015. On the one hand, many Greeks were remarkably welcoming, especially given their own financial distress. On the other, the question of origins became an existential one: what did it mean to be Greek and who was allowed to claim this title?

Caught amidst these swirling, eternal debates from the first years of his life, Neritan has never been able to find simple answers. But all these complexities, Neritan says, “add up to a mosaic of a Balkan kid who attempts to shape the world and make sense of it to produce my art.” Further, Neritan’s ambiguous position has afforded him some precious distance from his surroundings. As he describes: “Every time I think about my distance from others, I see it as a bridge-to-become, not as an insurmountable barrier. And anyways, I feel safer when there is a distance between me and the things that I seek. Only then can I enjoy the process of reaching them. Even if I cannot see my destination, I know there is something waiting for me. ”

Throughout Neritan’s life, the most vital channel for his seeking has been cinema. He began watching films from a young age, as his older sister worked at one of Athens’ most well-known downtown movie theaters. He has seen many of his most beloved movies ten, twenty times. This early immersion was pivotal: he became wholly convinced by the power of film. He laughs as he recalls one striking example from his youth: “I remember many films that I saw with my sister, arthouse films. But I also remember seeing Flubber. We were in Vouliagmeni, in Athens, at an outdoor cinema. The place was filled with families, especially children, and they were all laughing. As the film went on, the kids began jumping up and down: they were being demonized by the movie. This is a power that I think only film can have — once you open your eyes to it, its possession of you never ends. I believe you become possessed by what you see and then these images shape your life and how you see the world.”

By the age of 18, he gathered his resources and made a clear declaration to his parents: they had to let him abandon a conventional path and allow him to work professionally in cinema. He knew this would be a hard argument to win so he left nothing to chance: “My first film involved over 25 people. I had to make something really worthwhile, really professional, to show them I was serious. I wanted to show my parents the depth of my desire.”

From his first film, Neritan learned an important lesson about himself: “I am really social. I like to talk and express myself. I like to rub against and mix with other people, in a positive way. I’ve discovered how important it is to discuss ideas, to negotiate with one’s collaborators. On the other hand, I am never a person to discount or cheapen my vision. If I have a picture of something in my head, I want to have it as it is — otherwise, my life has no meaning. I am making huge sacrifices to be a filmmaker, so if I can’t make the film as I am picturing it, what’s the point? And in the moments when I find myself seeing the same way as 20 other people, it’s so beautiful. But at other times, these negotiations drives me mad. When I’m trying to convince others to join me, there are moments when I feel like a magician, hiding the ball and making it show up in my other hand. At other times, I feel like a politician, transforming myself into a person that others will follow. From start to finish, making a film is a full-on psychological effort.”

Fortunately for Neritan, his first film was a success — that is, his parents agreed to let him follow his dream. His self-confidence was rewarded when his second short film, produced at the age of 22, received major recognition. The work garnered awards and was shown at festivals around the world. As he describes, “Suddenly, my phone was ringing constantly and I was being crushed with requests. I felt overwhelmed and decided I needed a clean slate if I wanted to go forward. So, I moved to Romania, where no one cared about my local fame. I felt safer there because I could once more find ways to expand my creative limits.”

Such precocious success reminds Neritan of one of his key inspirational figures: Michelangelo. With a characteristic twinkle in his eye, he recounts the following story about one of his creative heroes: “The first time I went to Italy, I spent time with the most beautiful thing I have ever seen: the sculpture of David. I knew right away that it was the product of a curious mind. Michelangelo began working on it when he was still in his 20s. He made it from a single piece of marble.” Then, darkening slightly, he continued, “But since seeing it, I have often thought of something else: there is always a person behind the work of art. We often only think about the final product, not the process. Over time, I have come to confront the reality that the artist’s life is hard. I have no financial security and no routine. But I feel convinced that it’s a path worth sacrificing for.”

Neritan’s early recognition also pushed him in other ways. For one, he had to ask himself at a young age one of the most important questions for any self-directed person: “How do I define success?” Winning awards and making festival shortlists, Neritan realized, were only a short-term salve. In his analysis, “Many contemporary filmmakers don’t care much about art. Their work doesn’t have teeth. They adapt to trends and make ‘festival films’ in order to have their work circulate. But as I learned, by chasing success, it’s impossible to keep consistent. Success, for me, is about expressing yourself in the biggest capacity you can. Whether you have ten thousand or ten million dollars, the underlying struggle is the same: how do you put your work in line with your thoughts?” And then, to conclude, he relates a piece of family wisdom, “Growing up, we used to say, ‘You only polish what is visible.’ But in doing so, you don’t explore what’s really going on inside you, deep and out of view.”

Besides using films as a means of self-expression, Neritan has aligned himself with storytelling as one of his core artistic principles: “For me, telling a story has unlimited possibility. But it also comes with a great challenge: you have to give to a non-existent person a gravity and consistency.” He then relates another formative experience: “An essential book for me was The Eating of the Gods, by the Polish theater critic Jan Kott. He opens by saying the dead never die: they remain alive thanks to the attention of living. Since then, I’ve felt that as a creator, I have an extra burden: not only to my audience, but to my characters, to keep their stories alive.”

This is consistent with Neritan’s next project. Recently, he discovered the story of a monk who died on Mt. Athos, the all-male Orthodox monastic community in the north of Greece, in 1932. The monk, amazingly, was a self-taught filmmaker. Neritan found his archive and has begun visiting the holy mountain to reconstruct his images in the present-day. Neritan’s aim is to revive the vision of this kindred spirit.

But Neritan’s time with the monks has brought on other lessons — ones which bring us back to my initial questions about self-belief and finding inner fulfilment. As Neritan told me, “I am investing time, money, and energy to deal with these hermits. But they really don’t care about me. Their indifference brings me into a parallel world. I could tell them about this festival or that award and it wouldn’t make any difference for them. They don’t care about the magic show that I put on when I’m trying to pitch a film. They just look at me. At that moment, my only option is to wait. On the mountain, I have to be in total silence for hours. That’s why I love spending time there. Through them, I’ve learned that waiting is its own form of training. Waiting has become part of my education, a newly vital part of my life. By waiting, I am reminded that I am young and I want to be loved.” And then, Neritan pauses; I see the burden of struggle on the face of a young artist who has been making things work for 14 years in the world of independent cinema. But soon enough, he brightens again: “I’m thankful for how this project has smoothed me down and forced me to think about who I want to be. Right now, I am using this mountain covered with monks to face myself. I think everyone has their own holy mountain.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

For the first few minutes of our time together, filmmaker Daphné Hérétakis and I struggle to find the right words. We begin in Greek, stumble a bit and attempt English; she learns I spent time in Paris, so we try to connect in French. Daphné has been doing this kind of dance her whole life: born in Greece to an Italian mother and Greek father; educated partially in Paris before coming back to Athens for high school; returned to France for her studies in film. Her work, similarly, rests at borders: between fiction and documentary, purely autobiographical yet also descriptive of an entire generation of young Athenians. Indeed, Daphné’s work straddles many boundaries and peripheries — after all, the edge is where the most interesting work is made.

Eventually, we find our footing: we flit between Greek, English, and French, searching for the right words, les mots justes. Though she expresses a weariness with labels, I can’t help but ask her: does she feel like a “director,” a realisateur, or a σκηνοθετης, each word carrying its own valences and differing shades of authority and control. Daphné’s answer sets the frame for the rest of our time together: “I’ve avoided these titles for a long time. I like the American term ‘filmmaker.’ It’s a modest thing: you can ‘make’ a film using only your hands, as with any other art form. You can paint on film, put scratches on it, glue together a film from scraps. I’m not so extreme in my own practice — though I do process some of my films by hand. But this philosophy reflects the fact that I come from an experimental background. In the 1970s in France, they called it ‘a different cinema’: one that couldn’t take place in the larger industry. It’s true, I feel much more like an artisan than part of an industrial machine.”

“My real dream,” she goes on to say, “is to be a ‘film farmer’ or a ‘cinema farmer.’ What do I mean? I want filmmaking to be something I can practice every day. I want it to be a part of my life, not a major production that I have to direct. I don’t care about the technical parts of being a director and I certainly don’t enjoy raising money. What I hate most about the process of preparing a feature film, in the conventional way, is that you have to convince many, many people of your idea, and finally, when you have enough money, you have the permission to shoot for 10 days, 20 days, maybe 30 days. This is insane. I don’t want to have 30 consecutive days to prove I can make a film. Filmmaking needs time and space. It can’t be rushed. Maybe it needs one year, two years. It has to grow.”

Since Daphné’s relationship to cinema is so deeply personal, she aims to make the creative process as non-hierarchical as possible. This extends to the way she approaches the world with her camera. In several works, Daphné films a mix of friends and complete strangers on the street, engaging with them in intensely personal conversations, asking such questions as, “Do you have hope for the future? Do you believe in freedom?” In doing so, she engages with her subjects as equals, making herself as vulnerable as those she puts under the unblinking scrutiny of her lens. But her resolute intimacy also hints at something else: the unburdened eye of an outsider, the distance from which she observes her surroundings. Her subtle estrangement from the world — whether she is in Greece, where she is considered French, or in France, where she is considered Greek — drives her need to understand, and pushed her to make work in her first homeland.

As she puts it, “If I hadn’t left for France so early, I wouldn’t have wanted to come back to Greece to understand it. Every time I come here, there is a distance which I have to overcome to figure out who I am, what is this place’s history, and what is its current situation. When I was younger, I felt my distance was a problem and tried to ignore it. But eventually, I learned to share my authentic feelings — anger, loneliness, despair — and draw on them during the making of my films. This gave me an excuse to talk to people about difficult topics, creating a space for them to reveal their deepest feelings. Such exchanges allowed me to inscribe my story into a larger, more collective one. Ultimately, sharing such intense emotions gets me out of my head and helps me feel less alone. But I have come to recognize there will always be a gap, not least of all because there is a camera between us.”

In her 2014 film Archipelago, for example, she explores this in-between space. The film is brilliantly narrated through a friend’s journal — a diary that Daphné asked her friend to keep, since Daphné wasn’t living in Athens at the time and wanted access to the rhythms of daily life. As viewers, the diary invites us to join Daphné on an intimate journey alongside her distant friend, bringing us closer to a local’s experience of the city. At the same time, Daphné spends much of the film riding around Athens by car, seeing the urban landscape flow by like a first-time tourist. Throughout the film, there is both agreement and disagreement between the words and the images. As Daphné describes: “Sometimes there is a closeness between the text and the image, and other times a distance. I didn’t want to illustrate my friend’s words but rather create a difference. Yet every time the distance gets too great, I become intimate again and close the gap.” As with any act of bridging or translation, there are moments of both success and failure.

For all the journal’s soothing intimacy, Daphné contrasts this feeling with the jarringly direct questions she poses to people, of all ages, on the streets of Athens. By holding the shots for far longer than feels comfortable, Daphné conveys the tense but beautiful anxiety that occurs when confronting life’s biggest uncertainties. As the frame holds and holds, while a loaded question like “What is your biggest fear?” hangs in the air, we can feel Daphné trying to get closer, trying to understand. Ultimately, she describes the film’s aim as “taking small things that people don’t give importance to and making a document of them. In other words, I try to make a trace from a moment of time, a personal testimony, a subjective time capsule.”

She goes on to admit, “It’s really scary — but that’s why I do it. People often feel their answers are banal or stupid but they’re not: they’re honest. It’s amazing to see how people are already thinking about those things and are ready to open up if you really listen to them. All of us have moments where we feel vulnerable or alone but we rarely find ways to share these feelings, especially with strangers. It’s easy to overlook these shared moments of solitude; it’s easy to forget that there is a collective inner strength in people, one that comes out in times of crisis, when people are pushed to the edge. By reaching out to others, I allow them to be surprised by their own answers. In their honesty, I feel there is hope.”

Indeed, all of Daphné’s work rests at another border: between planning and surprise. As she says, “I don’t control anything — the city, the interviews, the diary.” For example, the use of her friend’s diary, which seems like a masterful bit of foresight, was actually a plan B. After she asked her friend to keep this journal for her, Daphné heard no news about it for months, and had almost given up on the idea. Only when she read the diary and began editing her images, did she understand the resonance between all of the material she had gathered. As she says, “The only thing I control is the editing, which is its own form of construction, even fictionalization.” But even with editing, the whole process feels instinctual, not analytical. For Daphné, it is moments of synchronicity and lucky accidents like reading her friend’s diary that help convince her when she is “in the right terrain.”

Daphné’s entire artistic development has been intuitive, difficult to premeditate. In particular, Daphné has never been able to fit into a single genre, especially between the two old poles of documentary or fiction. “It’s no accident,” she says,” that my films have long been going to both kinds of festivals.” Carving her own path has made things harder for her, but the process has been full of discovery. As she explains, “What kind of festivals do I submit to? Who do I apply for money from? I have to deal with so many different people and each time, I have to adapt to what they want, what they think, what they know. Trying to push others into a new territory, an in-between space — everyone always feels the risk is huge. Meanwhile, I am constantly having to explain and prove that something different is possible.”

In her next film, Daphné wrote a script for once (in order to raise money) and is working with actresses: all new territory. Even the casting process was a bit uncomfortable, as Daphné had the power to make people come to her and put on a performance. Still, she has made everything as open as possible. The script is spare, focusing almost exclusively on the relationship between two young women. There will be many improvisational parts and Daphné is recording the pair as much as she can, in both audio and video. Her hope is to afford them as much freedom as possible to be themselves and prepare before the pressure of “action!”

As we discuss her upcoming about youth, I think about how many student works or first films circle back to the self and mine the filmmaker’s own biography. Does Daphné worry about becoming too personal? Her response are words often repeated but much less often taken to heart: no, you need to make your work more personal. “I wish everyone made films more from experience rather than imitating what they’re supposed to make. It’s so easy to find some short-term success by following the trends. But I wonder what will stay from these films, which ones will have a lasting impact. I can see a film that is personal and it can have 100 technical problems, but if it’s honest, I usually like it. It tells me something different. I wouldn’t mind if someone made something diaristic all their lives.”

But this is not the biggest trap. For Daphné, there are two: comfort and money. To counter comfort, Daphné is now working in the realm of fiction; she had found that she was no longer at her edge, and so is pushing herself to see where this form takes her. And for money, the simple means of production are exactly what attracted her to documentary film rather than fiction. As a filmmaker, waiting for money is torture, and in any case, money is a trap. It comes with rules, constraints, expectations. Which is why Daphné feels better working as improvisationally as possible, with an open timeline and following her own rhythms. Like she said at the start, she sees herself as a cinema farmer, tending to her garden with nothing more than a few tools, some water, and the Greek sunshine.

She concludes, “As much as I go back and forth to France, I think I have to be on the periphery; it’s impossible for me to be at the centre. I am always wondering what can happen at the periphery, what will be possible there. Looking out while standing on the edge makes things easier to see. Ultimately, though, the freedom I’ve always felt by being between two countries, two languages, two genres: that’s what makes things exciting. When I make a film, I never know what it’s about. If I knew beforehand, I wouldn’t see any purpose in making it. Other people work from a script and want their film to illustrate it. But I want to explore something; it’s a form of research. Sure, I have an idea but maybe it will turn out wrong, maybe the opposite will prove true. I only find out once I begin.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

From 1987 to 2018 it’s 32 long years. At one end is my participation in the ARTWORKS selection panel for the monetary prizes to moving picture artists; at the other, my graduation from Stavrakos Film School as “film director”. Between the two ends, a labyrinthine course for this “artistic” identity to find room to survive as an endemic species among others — a necessity in this complex social food chain. I am talking primarily about room to exist, not room to be accepted, let alone be supported and encouraged.

Eventually, I was able to find and recognise this place not on the way of the young person I once was and needed it but on the way of the person who is now working to make it happen, to supply it to those who need it today. I saw ARTWORKS as an attempt at providing such room, as an attempt for a new layout, an opening up of an expanse within reality where the artistic identity can live. And I was glad to have been able to contribute to this.

I am not sure which science could undertake the examining of the artistic identity in Greek society; not being a scientist myself, I would welcome a paper on the subject. Until then, based on my experience and that of my coevals, I would compare an artist in Greece to Odyssey’s “Nobody”: an unclassified person on the fringe of social give-and-take, a vague entity which cannot be translated in terms of normal life. A romantic at best; at worst, a “pariah”; and in-between one who needs to keep renewing their residence permit in society by submitting the necessary documentation, or else hole up inside themselves and fade to nothingness.

The culture of supporting artists as artists, in view of their special life conditions, was and still is absent in Greece unlike other countries, where state subsidies mirror, if only symbolically, a certain recognition of the merit of artistic processes. Most public funds in Greece are channelled to art foundations and not directly to artists; even on the rare occasions this happens, it is usually linked to a specific project. An artist’s chance of securing a personal subsidy is almost nonexistent, although as a society we exploit to the utmost, financially and ideologically, the art bequeathed to us by History. It may be this abundance of masterpieces and their trouble-free appropriation that makes us forget the human endeavour behind them.

Amidst this chronic deficiency, I translated the ARTWORKS venture as the structural gesture a society must make in order to show interest in this human prerequisite of art. A gesture that puts artistic creation in the cellular matrix of reality, connecting what we call art “in general” with the specific individuals who toil in adversity, under specific circumstances, and yet they are creative in the end. Not less important about this new gesture is that it’s being addressed to young people, so that we get the two poles shaped in synchronicity: a new mindset about cultural policy taking shape at the same time as its subjects, the artists themselves.

What is funded here is not a specific project but the project of the self, of self-determination. What is supported is the artists’ non-negotiable need to be shaped and to survive among us as artists, to introduce themselves as artists and to be able to live as artists. We talk with them and about them, mobilise ourselves for them, take their plans seriously and decide to help them be, not do; be first and foremost, in order for them to go ahead and do.

Without guidelines and specifications as to how they’ll use the money that comes with the prize, free to channel it towards their livelihood or invest it in their education, spend it on research or some project, the young practitioners are credited not just with funds but with the trust that each new generation deserves. Perusing the candidates’ files, I feel having seen the map of this generation, its own destinations and the new media it picks out for this journey — and all this in a rich variety: the range of the candidates’ ages, from 25 to 40, and everything it entails (different levels of experience, different stages in one’s career), ultimately make up a polyphony which we should be able to see in our cinemas, galleries and public spaces as a reflection of what preoccupies, or should preoccupy, our world today.

History shows that art shifts its forms and content at a pace that leaves behind the frameworks (theoretical, institutional, economic) structured around it, and keeps breaking its own codes time and again. Inevitably, all new artists and new works pay the price for this shift, the price of modernity, struggling for the survival of their work and hence for their own survival too. This makes the necessity for support even more crucial for young artists as the key agents of rupture and transition, as the guarantors of renewal. The connection of local elements to the global context, the biopolitical nature of the family, issues of identity, sexuality, desire or political engagement indicative of a society in transition, and new poetic forms (a freer morphology and broadened fields of expression): these are the new traits I saw in motion pictures, the field in which I was specifically involved, and these traits differ a lot from those in the films of earlier periods. It will take a strenuous effort for these languages to conquer the market, find channels to introduce themselves to the public. Yet, if we want an art in synchronicity, organically tied to our life, we have no choice but to support it at the very moment it is born.

Another reason why I think this funding, combined with the freedom to use it at will, is highly significant is the fact that it comes at a time of crushing economic rationalism, when such an almost unconditional gift risks being banished to the sphere of the unreal or beyond the limits of social impertinence.

The historical conjuncture plays its own role and makes this statement even bolder as, amidst an impoverished society, it conveys funds to a seemingly unessential activity: artistic expression. I do not mean to downplay the real importance of the subsidy as a financial aid: an artist’s livelihood has always been a tale of woe, and most artists live in permanent crisis, regardless of the historical conditions. All resources are vital to those not closely or firmly attached to the chain of production. However, it is important to discern the symbolism of social acts and their surplus-value beyond mere numbers.

I think that, if the crisis has any place at all in this assessment, what is most worth discussing is how the programme attempts to synchronize society with its emerging art at this specific moment in time: the fact that it regards as an important goal this synchronicity in the purest area of the social corpus, the one occupied exclusively by young adults. Within a floundering country and despite the collective bemusement, the unprecedented numbness and the unbearable social inertia, the power of young people and the unawareness of the risks it enjoys as a privilege do produce results. All this material could be left to its solitary struggle against chance, as it happened with so many earlier generations, when eventually individuals achieved personal records and broke them too. Here, however, we are talking about the effort to gather a generation around a core of expression, about perceiving culture and creation beyond isolated cases.

From my post I sought out this fresh, current discourse which may be revised later by its own exponents. I looked for this spontaneous desire which tomorrow may be written down as the awkward gesture of a middle-aged practitioner. I searched for the fascination of experimenting which may be rendered obsolete by others in the future. I did not look for something fixed and established but for a move in some direction, for the robust whisper which has yet to be heard in the “here and now”, even though it encompasses it, strangely enough. I am glad to have witnessed an entire mechanism mobilising itself towards a beautiful promise, towards something far from definitive. I hope that this energy becomes an addiction, a second nature to those who gather around it.

Because, the essence of this emerging task is to me the reflection of a sound and clear idea of the culture and the society we wish to live in; an idea that extends, that must extend beyond the conjuncture of the recession in which it was born. We know that even in times of affluence, the arts and the artist remain “lost causes” for our societies. For they keep asking questions on “priorities” which people have always found hard to answer; a philosophical matter with ramifications that we will always be evading. This crisis, and every crisis, will be forever linked to this elusiveness. We won’t resolve it in one go, but it is crucial that we aspire to resolve it. Aspiration is the one right we must not relinquish as a society, especially today when everything and everyone is trying to convince us that we don’t deserve it.

Christos Karakepelis, ARTWORKS Mentor for the 1st SNF Artist Fellowship Program, studied social sciences and film directing. Ηe has directed several documentaries including ‘The House of Cain’ which explores the existential situation of seven ordinary people who have committed murders and ‘Raw Material’, a film that plunges into the most poverty-stricken districts in Athens to discover the invisible link between immigrants’ shantytowns and Greece’s steel industry. He teaches documentary film at the University of Athens and the Stavrakos Film School, and for the past four years he has been directing the annual documentary workshop at Polychoros KET.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): While preparing for our discussion, I came across your “Electric Swan” on ERT2. Although we may not be personally acquainted, it filled me with pride to acknowledge the numerous awards you’ve received for this particular film. How does it feel when you rewatch older works?

Konstantina Kotzamani (KK): Well, I rarely go through older films, meaning I don’t actually watch them that often. For me, these works are more like geographical maps of memories that I can empathize with rather than films to criticize. They carry with them many things and emotions: which song made me cry when the idea was born, with whom I was in love, what was my address at that time, what was terrifying on the news at that moment, and whether my mother used to call me more often.

Konstantina Kotzamani, Limbo (still), 2016

NV: Could you condense the essence of your cinematic style into five words?

KK: Music from afar. Wakes the animals up. Connecting channels. In life and dreams. Multi-lasting endings like persistent fireworks.

NV: That is quite a poetic snapshot of your approach. What, in your opinion, are the most essential qualities for a film director to have?

KK: Always surprise yourself. Always discovering. Trail-blaze with images while listening to your inner voice. Fight for it wholeheartedly as you still believe in magic.

NV: Animals are also magical, as well as a recurring theme throughout your filmography. How come?

KK: All these animals open the box of my enigmas. At the very beginning of the writing process, I call on an animal for inspiration. The animal shares with me its qualities and gradually becomes part of the storytelling, like a spiritual coach or a totem.

Konstantina Kotzamani, Washingtonia (still), 2014

NV: Last time we talked over the phone, you shared some exciting details about your upcoming feature film, “Titanic Ocean,” which centers on a school in Japan that trains teenage girls into professional mermaids. Could you delve a bit deeper into the creative process and inspiration behind this intriguing project?

KK: Some years ago, I stumbled across a photo in an article - three young girls in the middle of a pool in mermaid costumes. My first impression was that this image was fake. But as it turned out, a mermaid training class was actually taking place. I soon discovered that not only do professional mermaid schools exist, but that they are an ever-growing trend in many Asian countries.
And this is how “Titanic Ocean” was born: transforming real-life events into pure fantasy, merging my love for water and filmmaking. The film is set in a special boarding school in Japan, where troubled teenage girls follow their dreams and train to become professional mermaids. Choose a nickname, stick glitter and diamonds on your face, dye your hair to match your mermaid tail. But everyday life in the school is very hard with a full-day program, expanding your lungs and holding your breath for five whole minutes, gliding with real sharks, and dancing with fish. Akame, a 17-year-old trainee, seems a bit different from the other girls. She is reserved, and you barely hear her speak. But inside the school, under her fake silicone mermaid tail, she discovers her Siren Voice and its devastating sequences to the ones she loves.

Konstantina Kotzamani, Electric Swan (still), 2019

NV: Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed a noticeable increase in eco-art, particularly hydro-art, at prominent cultural events. It seems there’s a growing fascination with exploring and learning from water. How do you contribute to this evolving discussion?

KK: My plan is to mold an unexpected postmodern coming-of-age story with fragments from myths and dark, watery fairy tales, from the Little Mermaid to Homer’s Sirens. But in “Titanic Ocean,” the girls learn to love the depths of the ocean in the interior pools of the school without touching the real water. Even in the aquarium, where they dream of working, they look like captivated animals next to the polar bear section.

The film invites you to more sensorial cinema that questions the invisible world beyond the five senses, where the limit between the known and the unknown is fluid. It is a story of female empowerment that calls you to dive deeper and listen to your breath. The protagonist’s journey into the ocean is a return to our origins, where everything once began. At the same time, it is about reaching the end of the world. Destruction and Rebirth.

NV: I recall you mentioned you just returned from France, and it’s evident that your work takes you to various destinations for shooting and development. I’m curious; could you share some of your favorite places you’ve had the opportunity to visit during your creative journeys?

Konstantina Kotzamani, Electric Swan (still), 2019

KK: Shooting in Buenos Aires with friends was an unforgettable experience. France again was really crazy as we shot on a boat in the middle of the Corsica Sea. This time, the Far East is quite challenging. Maybe shooting a film about shooting my first feature film in Japan will be Lost in Translation No2…

NV: As we near the end of our conversation, I’d love to hear your insights on what the future of cinema holds.
KK: I think the same future as music and poetry. They are places that exist somewhere above us, and they will stay longer than us.

—

Konstantina Kotzamani was born and raised in Greece, where she graduated from the Film Department of Thessaloniki University. Her short movies have premiered in major festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlinale, and Locarno and have received numerous international awards. They have been broadcast in Europe, Asia and the USA and distributed on platforms like Criterion and Mubi. She has been thrice awarded by the Hellenic Film Academy with the best short film award and twice nominated by the European Film Academy for the best short of the year (EFA award). Her latest film, Electric Swan, was declared Best Short of the Year by the French Critics’ Association. Her films have been the theme of retrospectives in festivals like BAFICI, Istanbul, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, while she was a jury member in multiple short film festivals. Her films explore primordial themes such as love and dreams, mystery, and the surreal in life while creating alternative realities. In 2018, she was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.

Nicolas Vamvouklis is an art curator and writer. He is the artistic director of K-Gold Temporary Gallery and has curated exhibitions at Mediterranea 19 Biennale, 7th Thessaloniki Biennale, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Since 2016, he has served as senior curator at the Benetton cultural panorama. He has also collaborated with Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Marina Abramovic Institute, Prague Quadrennial, and Triennale Milano. Vamvouklis contributes to art magazines and publications, including The Art Newspaper and MIT Press. In 2021, he was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Kostis Charamountanis is a sui generis case of a young and promising Greek director. The fact that he is self-taught and has worked as an actor, music composer, sound designer, editor, second assistant director and production assistant in theatre, television and film only partly account for his originality. His films (six shorts and three video clips) are refreshingly experimental and unpretentiously fresh, while clearly attempting to playfully re-engage with cinematic narrative. With a few awards already under his belt — at the Athens International Film Festival and Drama International Short Film Festival — the SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020) has already completed his first feature film entitled Kyuka — Journeying to the Moon Through the Endless Sea, which was produced by Heretic. Just before the launch of the film’s long-awaited festival run, Charamountanis talked to us about his artistic vision and all the elements that compose it.

How did you get into cinema? What is your first cinematic memory and when did it first occur to you to become a director?

It’s something I’ve been wanting to do since I was little. I used to say I wanted to be an actor, a chef or a director. I’ve always been drawn to cinema. Certain films I developed an obsession for — Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. I loved watching the making of, how these worlds and these characters were created. In primary school, after watching Mrs. Doubtfire with Robin Williams on a summer afternoon, I started making movies with my friends. I’m not sure why I was so inspired by that film in particular. It was all improvisation, we were just playing around with my sister’s camera, which I used to take without telling her. At first, we would just watch the clips on the camera, using the arrows to move through the scenes. Later, I taught myself how to edit everything on the computer. I didn’t know how to download music back then, so I would record tunes from my favourite films, like the Pirates, and use them as cover music for ours. In high school, one day I wrote out the entire script of Pirates of the Caribbean in Greek. I had learned practically the whole thing by heart. I must have seen it about 60 times, I remember counting 56, but I’m sure it was more. I did that because we wanted to make our own version with the means we had in hand as children. We didn’t get round to it, though. At some point, the interest waned. Still, we had decided who was going to do what: I would be the director, someone else would do the set, someone would play Jack Sparrow. My first cinematic memory is from Titanic. I was pretty young, maybe about four. I remember trying very hard to figure out what the film was about. I had the impression that what I was seeing on the screen was real, probably because someone had told me that the sinking of the Titanic was a true story. I remember asking my parents if a boat has to sink every night, so that people can watch it. My professional involvement with cinema came about in a very organic way. In 2015, after graduating from the Drama School of the National Conservatory of Athens, I had already decided I wasn’t interested in acting, so I spent some time experimenting mostly with music and a bit with writing. A short monologue came out of this, which later evolved into my first short film, The Eye and the Brow. At first, I was scared to direct it myself. I felt I was completely clueless, which was actually true. The script was definitely written in the wrong format, it was more a poem than anything else. I tried to get somebody else to do it, so I went to ask my former teacher Angelos Frantzis, who recommended several people and was very helpful both during that first approach and later on. I was full of questions about cinema, festivals, the filming process, the script, how it all works other than the acting part which I had been trained for at School. I didn’t find anyone who wanted to direct my script. Therefore, I figured out very soon that anything I wanted to do I would have to do myself, without relying on anyone else. So that was the starting point. I did my own research, asked around, read, used my own money and made my first film.

Kostis Charamountanis, The Eye and the Brow, 2016

In your CV and in your interviews, you often mention you are an autodidact. How much freedom does this give you compared to someone who has studied film?

None of the directors I have studied and now admire have studied cinema. Still, they became legendary because they managed to create and leave behind a distinctive, unique and precious cinematic universe. This put my mind at ease. Their stories inspired me and helped me stop feeling inferior to people with cinema degrees. I understood that making good films is based on much more that that. In my experience, and obviously without wanting to discredit anyone’s studies, I find that being an autodidact has helped me develop my own filmmaking voice with more clarity and delve deeper into the elements I want to explore, in my own way and taking as long as I need. This is a more direct and perhaps more creative way of discovering cinema. Mistakes are invaluable, and I am happy to say I’ve made plenty. In my experience, you learn a lot through this process. I believe that if you haven’t studied, failure leaves you more exposed and more vulnerable. People around you become harsher. It is much more difficult to start out like this, coming practically out of nowhere, without the protective bubble of an academic environment. It worked for me at least. It meant there was more at stake and made me determined to succeed. There are risks involved in this. This path is definitely not for everyone. Personally, I feel that I didn’t have a choice. Being in a classroom makes me really nervous. I hate it. I feel really stupid. I just can’t function. Just before making my first film, I had put some money on the side. I thought, either I’ll go to a film school for three years or, with the same money, I’ll make films and learn the trade through practicing it. I soon decided that the second option was more fun, and better suited for me. I felt I couldn’t be bothered to go to school. I had just come out of one, I didn’t feel like starting all over. And, to be honest, most of the film students I asked weren’t very enthusiastic either. They said I was right to choose this path. Learning things by myself is part of who I am. It’s how I’ve always done things, even with music composition. I’ve had no musical training, but I’ve taught myself how to play and write music in other ways. It just comes to me, it’s organic. For me, learning by myself equals absolute freedom and represents the best and most creative ways of exploring my interests. Others value much higher the experience, guidance and structure the film school has to offer. I used to be more extreme in this view. I used to say that cinema schools are a waste of time and money. Now I think it’s simply a question of preference. But whenever someone interested in getting into cinema asks me what I think, I have never suggested that they go to film school.

How was your first experience behind the camera? What was your inspiration for The Eye and the Brow?

On the first day of filming for The Eye and the Brow, when we shot the first scene — the beach scene at the end of the film — I didn’t even know that I, as the director, was supposed to say “cut” at the end to stop the sound and the camera. I had no idea of the process, even though as an actor I had been to sets. I was hopelessly ignorant. There was an awkward silence, during which the scene was continuing in a loop. It was the moment when the girls had to inflate the air mattress, and they were really out of breath. Then a moment of silence, a blank look and Yannis, the cameraman, asking: “Are you going to say cut?” I was just hopelessly clueless. The following day, I was directing half-naked, wearing a drag suit and fake eyelashes. At the end of the scene, I would be playing the Big-Boobed Queen so, to save time, I was already in costume when we started filming. My father, who had come to the set to bring me some things, asked me: “Are you making porn movies?”. Filming lasted for three days if I remember correctly, and then Smaro and I spent one month editing. Everything happened very quickly. I did the trailer. It was the first time I edited anything after acting school. I was so excited, we had even shaped the poster of the film as a CD so that the DVDs (back then you had to submit a DVD for the festival in Drama) can fit the film’s logo. When it came out, I was very insecure about the outcome, but it was reassuring to see that people were laughing and that they had understood it was a comedy. This happens to me with every film. The Eye and the Brow was, in essence, just a long thought sequence. I remember walking around with a notepad in my hands, jotting down my thoughts as freely as possible, trying not to censor myself. The core of the film is that someone has died and what we are basically watching are his thoughts. I had read in an article that when we die the brain remains active for about seven minutes, during which you can have dreams, maybe even see snapshots of your life. Another major influence was my years in drama school. All the actors in the film used to be my classmates. The film has a very strong theatrical element. It’s staged a bit like an improvised performance, just like the ones we did at the school. We didn’t have anyone to do make-up or our hair. We did everything ourselves. All the stuff and the props we used I had bought myself. Wes Anderson was another key influence. In terms of cinematography, style, music and, more generally, directorial approach. Wes Anderson was the first director I studied when I came out of school. The script for my first short came out of a drawing I did, with an eye and a brow. The eye is kind of clinging onto the brow. I liked the image, drew inspiration from it, it’s what prompted the monologue at the end of the film, I wanted to make a fairytale out of it, then an animation film — a bit like “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” from Harry Potter 7 — and then it became a script. I wrote it quickly, it took about two months, which to me felt like an eternity. Most people I gave it to didn’t like it, from what I could gather. Except for Angelos Frantzis, who really encouraged me to do it.

What inspires you to do your films? What would you say triggers you, in general? Is it an image or an idea? Do you perhaps combine disparate elements into a whole or do you take the original idea and develop it using your creativity and imagination?

All three at once, I would say. It happens in various ways. Usually, at the core of my films there is an idea that is interesting and inspiring to me, to which I then add other interesting ideas, phrases, characters, images, music, memories or sensations, which sometimes fit and sometimes don’t. Little by little, all these different elements start to create a world and later, as they get clearer, a plot. I love music, especially classical music. It is a big source of inspiration for me and plays a big part when I am writing the script. I also use a lot of music in my films. I try out things without restraining myself, I explore. The things that work I keep, and I discard everything that doesn’t suit me as an artist or doesn’t fit the direction I want to take. This is a very, very long process. I have a folder on my computer with all the films I’m working on. When I have something for one project, I open that file and work on it for as long as it takes. I write, revise, and then pick up the script again to read it with fresh eyes sometime later. And then all over again from the beginning. Every project changes form several times, until I decide which elements I like best. For Kyuka Before Summer Ends, my first feature which I finished filming last September, I must have produced at least 20 drafts of the script. I lost count, at some point. I grow and evolve with my films. I call them “my school”. I try to maintain a balance between poetry, storyline, characters and plot, and keep only the best and strongest ideas, i.e., the ones I find most interesting and which I believe will add more layers to the story. It’s something I started doing consciously and methodically from Kyuka onwards. It’s a process that gets my full attention. I really enjoy it. I obsess over my work and follow a strict working schedule. The shorts I’ve made so far have been more anarchic in nature. They are more instinctive and experimental and not so much about creating anything with structure. There’s no actual script for Kioku Before Summer Comes, Dog of Chamomile, Anthology of a Butterfly or Clouds Over My Backyard. The texts we used for them — when we did — I had written on my phone or as computer notes, and they are now gone.

Kostis Charamountanis, Kyuka Before Summer Ends, 2019

Your work can be described as experimental, avant-garde, poetic. Do you accept these terms? What role does narrative play in your work?

Yes, definitely. The only thing I don’t like about experimental films is that they have a reputation for being bad and of a lower quality. It doesn’t happen often that an experimental film gets to win the top prize at a festival. They carry a stigma. People don’t take them seriously. My films certainly involve a lot of experimentation. I’m not ashamed of it. I like experimentation. I think it’s a powerful tool that unleashes artistic creativity. For me, it might even be necessary. I get bored very easily. Even of my own films. I work on them every day and after a while I grow tired and bored. When I start to get bored, I work on the details. I rework my ideas, delving deeper and deeper into them and that’s what usually gives rise to experimentation. It’s the expression of the need to come up for air. Like with poetry. It makes all the difference. But not everywhere. I always aim to be experimental only where it’s really needed. The exact points are revealed to me organically. I try to make sure that all the elements that make up a film, especially at the editing stage, play an integral part in the overall story. I try to create a sound narrative, different every time but consistent with my artistic universe.

It has been written and proclaimed many times that cinema is dead or slowly dying, and that experimentation is the only way to resist to the dominant narrative mode. Do you share this view?

In my opinion, cinema is by no means dead. Especially for as long as there are people to support it. Cinema is neither dead nor slowly dying. It is perennial. It’s a major art form. One of the greatest, perhaps. Cinema gives us the opportunity to capture time and tell a story in many different ways that will conjure up thought and emotions. This is fascinating. Cinema envelops so many other art forms and people. Sometimes there is fertile ground for it to grow and blossom. Others not so much. It goes through phases. And this is perfectly normal. People need films, they need to watch them and they need to make them. The lockdowns made that crystal clear. I don’t know if in the future we will be watching movies using platforms or in theaters. For a number of reasons, these are difficult times for cinema and the cinema industry as a whole. This is a fact. It may change in the future. But watching a movie on the sofa or on a tablet is not the same as going to the cinema, whether it’s indoors or open-air. There are producers, directors and filmmakers who care more about festivals, trends and awards than about the audience that will go to see their films. Others prefer to make safer projects, using recipes that have been tried and tested. This leads to tedious repetition, and, in my opinion, to movies which are lacking nerve and are predictable. I don’t know if experimentation is the answer to that. I feel that, to a large extent, the Greek public doesn’t trust us anymore. The other absurd thing that happens is that bad, offensive, commercial films make tens of thousands of tickets. It’s a complex issue to which I don’t have a specific answer. Nor have I actually studied it enough to say anything more. But to answer your question, the only thing I know for certain is that I will try to make good films in my own way. I will continue to make films for as long as I enjoy and feel that I am getting something out of it.

Which are your key influences and your favourite movies?

Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Harmony Korine and Peter Tscherkassky. As I spend all day working on my films, I very rarely watch movies anymore. Among my favourite films, which I have watched several times over, are: The 400 Blows (1959) by Francois Truffaut, Uncle Yanco (1967) by Agnes Varda, Even Dwarves Started Small (1970), Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972) by Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams (1982) by Les Blank, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) by Harmony Korine, To Be and to Have (2002) by Nicolas Philibert and, still now, Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) by Gore Vebrinski. Werner Herzog is my favourite director. I admire his work very much. I’ve watched all his films. I recommend them to anyone who is interested in cinema. They have nothing to do with cinema. When he came to Greece, I went up to him and shook his hand, bowing to him like a fool without even realising.

How easy is it to be a young director in Greece?

Judging from my psychology at the moment, I would say it is very, very difficult. Nothing is easy, absolutely nothing. In my experience, at least, it is all stress and anxiety. You need to work very long hours. Emotionally, it is a grueling process. You need to make sacrifices and compromises all the time. You have to take enormous risks. You’re essentially on your own. I’ve often been at the verge of giving up. More so a few years ago, before I did the feature. I haven’t felt that way in some time now. But that’s the nature of the business. I’ve accepted it. For others, things come easier or sometimes even harder. It is what it is. It takes a strong stomach.

Kostis Charamountanis, Dog of Chamomiles, 2019

You have directed three video clips. How did you end up collaborating with the musicians? Is your artistic approach different when you work on a video clip? Are you interested in doing more of this kind of work?

Video clips kind of came my way. Kristof was a friend. He liked my work, I liked his music, so we started talking about maybe doing something together kind of casually. In Giorgios’ case (Colour for a Rebel), I think he was the one who approached me. I really liked the track. I’ve never received payment for a video clip. The creative process is much more chaotic. Different rules apply. Video clips are not at the top of my list right now. They’re hardly on my mind at all. Nor have I had any more offers. I think it’s not very likely that I will be making more video clips. In a more professional and organized context, maybe.

Your first feature film is now complete and expected to begin its festival run soon. Tell us a bit about it. How did you choose the subject matter? Is it very different from your short films?

The film is entitled Kyuka Before Summer Ends. It was produced by Heretic and Danae Spathara — with List Productions, the Hellenic Film Center and ERT acting as co-producers. Konstantinos Koukoulios is the Director of Photography while Simeon Tsakiris, Konstantinos Georgopoulos, Elsa Lekakou and Elena Topalidou are cast in the leading roles. Kyuka is part of a trilogy beginning with the 2018 short film Kioku Before Summer Comes, which won me my first big award at the Athens International Film Festival in the Best Director Category. In Japanese, Kioku means memories, since the film sets up a collage of two children’s memories as they look forward to the beginning of summer. Kyuka means holidays. The third film will be called Kieru, which roughly translates as “the process of disappearing”. So we have: Kioku, Kyuka, Kieru. The titles didn’t have to be in Japanese. I liked the words, and, by sheer accident, they sounded similar. In Kyuka Before Summer Ends, we follow the story of a family of three. A single father, Babis, who goes on a sailing trip with his twin adult children, Konstantinos and Elsa. The trip, as we soon discover, is a pretext, as Babis’ true intention is to bring his children in contact with their biological mother who had abandoned them when they were young. The film is inspired by a patchwork of real events. Kyuka is very different from my previous work. It is, so to speak, a “normal film”, with a real plot and a linear, for the most part, narrative. The experimental element comes in only in the second half of the film, organically so since at this point there is space for it in the story. Kyuka combines elements from every film I’ve made so far. It is bathing in summer. It is deeply poetic and funny. It is moving and affecting. As a coming-of-age film, it examines the love between parents and children and the love between siblings, and how sometimes this love can become toxic. I’m very proud of the result and I feel that it fully represents the directorial approach I want to take at the moment. It’s a film I’ve been working on since the summer of 2017. It’s a part of my life and of myself. And I am so excited that this creative circle is slowly coming to a close. I can’t wait for you to see it.

What do you think about awards and festival distinctions? Is this something you actively pursue or do you see them as a necessary consequence of arthouse cinema?

I don’t care at all about awards. I don’t think they are part of my work. I think they are more useful for producers. When I first started out making films, I used to care a lot about awards and would get frustrated if I didn’t win. It seemed to me that the committees would select the people rather than the works. I don’t know much about festivals. Just some basic things about the ones held in Greece. I don’t know the first thing about what’s happening abroad. I find it very disorienting to keep thinking about awards, distinctions, trends and themes of festivals. For that reason, I have chosen to stay out of the circuit. I devote all my thoughts to writing and directing and I’m lucky enough to do more or less what I want. But it is definitely very rewarding when someone acknowledges your work and selects it among other. In 2018, when I won the Best Director Award at the Athens International Film Festival for Kioku Before Summer Comes, Lambis Haralambidis was on the jury. Five years later, life brought it so that we met again for the editing of Kyuka. Not much changed after I won the award. The degree of difficulty remained the same. There are directors who have collected a bunch of awards yet face the exact same problems as I do. So, like I said, I don’t care very much about them.

Are you interested in commercial success? Do you think about this at all?

Very much so. But in my own terms. I am interested in a type of commercial success that will come as a result of the quality of the film and will allow me to maintain my own mark as a director. I would never make a film I don’t believe in artistically. I’m interested in what the audience thinks. I care to know whether they liked the film or not, if they had a good time or not and if they were affected by the film. I like to create a hype. I don’t like to speak only to my audience. At the screening of The Beast Asleep during the 2017 Athens International Film Festival, a very nice old lady sitting in front of me just wouldn’t stop laughing. Ironically, the inspiration for the Beast was another old lady, though not a very nice one in her case, who used to call me a monster. The viewer is my first concern. But I try to combine this concern with doing what I really want. If it works for me, I take the risk and hope for the best.

Kostis Charamountanis, The Beast Asleep, 2017

All your films can be accessed for free on vimeo. Tell me about this choice of yours.

I want anyone to be able to access these films. They are my first ones. They are a series of experiments. They were created using the bare minimum. With my own money. I have never made any money from them, and that was a conscious choice. I believe this is consistent with the type of films they are. My hope is that someone who wants to make films but is told that it can’t be done, that it takes a lot of money (!) and you’d need to go to school (!) and whatnot, well, I hope these films will inspire that person to go on and make films without giving a damn what other people say. Kioku Before Summer Comes cost about 250 euros, even though filming dragged on for months. The actors were paid in ice cream, pizzas and cake. For Dog of Chamomile, I bought them the ticket for the bus to Marathon. Anthology cost 150 euros, plus souvlaki and a token fee I paid to Chryssi just as a thank you. These films were my learning curve. I don’t think it’s right to receive compensation for them. But their quality doesn’t compare to what I can do now. In my next films, I will do things differently. After all, I need to start making a living out of cinema, otherwise I won’t be able to sustain it for much longer.

Kostis Charamountanis, Anthology of a Butterfly, 2020

Do you think this is a good moment for Greek cinema?

In Greece, especially in Athens, summertime is prime cinema time. That’s very nice. Kyuka is perfect for an open-air cinema. Globally, though, it doesn’t look like this is a very good moment for Greek cinema. But I try not to think about it, as doing so would hamper my creativity and my desire to work. I’m 29 years old. This is the only reality I’ve known. I haven’t lived in an era when Greek cinema was doing well. These are the circumstances I grew up in, and I am used to them.

How do you see your work developing from now on? Do you think you will devote yourself to making feature films or will you continue the same mix?

I see it following a course that is very similar to the one I’ve been following: ever-expanding and ever-creative. With the feature coming out, this is a transitional period for me. Right now, I want my work to be clearer, sounder, more professional and more precise. The last few years I’ve been working hard to achieve this. I have dedicated and invested literally thousands of hours of work on the next scripts I am preparing. That’s why I stopped doing one film per year, which used to be my goal. I feel that I’ve made the most out of my first films. I will continue to make both feature films and short films because I enjoy it. At the moment, in parallel with finishing up Kyuka, I have already started working on the script for my next feature, entitled The Ecstatic Insanity of the Sad Shepherd[NS1] . The film has received development funding for the writing stage from the Greek Film Centre. In addition, I have two more shorts lined up, Kieru and Bloom . As mentioned earlier, Kieru is the third part of the trilogy Kioku, Kyuka, Kieru, whereas Bloom in a sense revisits the universe of Anthology of a Butterfly. I would like to secure funding before setting off to do these films, so inevitably it will take longer.

After watching Anthology of a Butterfly. I was expecting a feature film where all characters would have flowers instead of heads. If you didn’t have any budget restrictions what would the film of your dreams look like?

You don’t need a big budget to make a good film. Magnetic Fields is the most recent proof of that. Budget limitations have never kept me back, nor have I ever limited myself when choosing my material because I didn’t have enough budget. I think it’s really the most minor factor in a film. Since all my films were handmade, I have learned to think and create within set limits and in a scale that I can manage. As for the expectation you mentioned in your question, let’s just move on and pretend you never asked that because it’s there in Bloom! If my budget was unlimited, I would be making more money. I believe that even with a million euros, I would still make the exact same movies. In exactly the same way. Time, however, is a very important factor. The only thing that would change is that I would have more time to devote to each film. I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to finish. I wouldn’t be as anxious to stick to the day’s filming schedule, so we don’t fall behind.

Kostis Charamountanis is a film director born in 1994 in Athens, Greece. He has directed five films in total, the most acclaimed being Kioku Before Summer Comes (2018) and the most recent Anthology of a Butterfly (2020). Ηe is presently working on the script of his debut feature film, Kyuka Journeying to the Moon through the Endless Sea, which earned him a place at the MIDPOINT Feature Launch 2020 at the beginning of the year. He has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).

Tassos Chatzieffraimidis is a lawyer and a freelance writer based in Athens. He currently works as a film curator at Cinobo, a digital platform dedicated to independent and arthouse cinema.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Lida Vartzioti and Dimitris Tsakaleas, SNF ARTWORKS Fellows in 2022 and 2021 respectively, are among the very few directorial duos in Greek cinema, both in number and as concerns the genre of the cinema they serve. Yawth, their first short film and the biggest surprise of the 41st International Drama Short Film Festival in 2018, introduced us to two filmmakers still studying at the School of Film of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who spoke with a fresh eye and a pop aesthetic about something as simple and as complex, as timeless and as topical as the problems and anxieties of their generation. The follow-up was equally impressive, as their short films travelled to prominent international festivals such Karlovy Vary, Sarajevo, Palm Springs and Cairo but above all proved that, with each new film, the two directors are growing more mature yet while remaining true to their artistic vision and to the films they have been attached to since their teenage years. As their next short film is about to go into production and the duo is in the financing stage for the first feature, Lida Vartzioti and Dimitris Tsakaleas talked to us about what makes their cinema as special and as appealing to their generation but also to others.

Yawth, LIda Vartzioti & Dimitris Tsakaleas, 2018

The first contact with the moving image

Lida Vartziotis (LV): One of the things I remember most distinctly is my tendency to escape into fantasy. When I was little, I always wanted to write stories. Growing up with the films of Disney and Pixar, I realized I too could give flesh to the images I had in my head. I started looking into what it meant to be a director. I didn’t know there was a directing school in Greece, it was only recently that the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki had opened a film school admitting students through the general entry exams for Greek universities. So I tried to get in, hoping to satisfy my need to understand more about the world and to play with the world of my imagination.

Dimitris Tsakaleas (DT): My story is quite similar. From a very young age, I started thinking in images. I used to watch a lot of movies. I was, and still am, a big fan of Friends and I would watch the behind the scenes to see how the show was filmed. And as I was already thinking through images, I slowly discovered how you can create them. Lida and I met at the School of Film in Thessaloniki. We have a very similar background, so we clicked right from the start. We were watching very different films, Lida was into Kusturitsa and me into High School Musical, but we bonded immediately. At first, we were just doing film-essays in different university contexts, but on our third year we decided to do Yawth. I had already started writing the script for it — back then, Leda was writing the script for Good Girls Club: A Virginity Odyssey, our latest film. Our plan was to do just Yawth together and then I would help Leda direct Good Girls Club: A Virginity Odyssey by herself. But we kept postponing the project, until, at one point, we realized we didn’t want to make a movie separately. As we didn’t have the budget for Good Girls Club at the time, we did Sad Girl Weekend instead.

Sad Girl Weekend, Lida Vartzioti & Dimitris Tsakaleas, 2019

Realizing that there is a shared artistic vision

LV: What brought us together was the fact that we wanted to make the same films, despite having different references. Through our discussions, we realized that we shared similar experiences and were concerned about the same things. We wanted to talk about the same things. This is what united us.

DT: I think it’s a matter of having the same energy. With Lida, I feel like we are husband and wife and siblings at the same time. There was a very strong click from the beginning, we felt like we’ve known each other since we were kids. As students, without planning to, it just so happened that we lived across the street. We were talking to each other constantly, from morning to evening, day in and day out. Making films together was a natural development, it is this energy that comes out in our films.

Handling disagreements

LV: Being two means that we need to verbalize what we feel and think, and of course justify our choices. Dimitris and I discuss every idea we have and if one of us expresses a reservation, then we just move on. We don’t get into arguments, and none of us insists on getting their way. We never do that.

DT: Lida and I have never fought over artistic decisions.

The possibility of a solo project

LV and DT: Doing things separately doesn’t work for us. We have many director friends who take it as a given that they will be directing their own projects. We never saw things this way. Working together comes naturally to us, we don’t feel the need for a solo project.

Literal Legend, Lida Vartzioti & Dimitris Tsakaleas, 2021

The need for public higher education in the field of cinema

LV: The School of Film is housed in a public university, so it has the usual problems of all public universities in Greece. However, it offers a five-year film education, which includes courses that will prove very useful in the long run. Especially if your aim is to become a director, you learn a lot about other areas of film and about what it’s like to work with professionals from other fields. Also very important is the fact that you are taught art and film history, as well as film theory.

DT: It’s very important to have a university department like this in Greece. As professionals, we always feel that art and culture are marginalized in this country. It is expedient for a public university somewhere in Greece to offer cinema studies. Our teachers are excellent professionals and we have the chance to develop networks and collaborations with our fellow students. These things happen in private schools too, but there are students who can’t afford to go to those. Also, ours is one of the very few art schools across the world that offer a 5-year course of study. You learn a lot of things in depth and when you finish you feel ready to start working in film.

Happy Ending, Lida Vartzioti & Dimitris Tsakaleas, 2022

Yawth or how it all started

LV: Dimitris had the idea for Yawth. He wrote the script during the summer before our third year. And when we came back to Thessaloniki, I read it and we decided to do it together, to write and direct it together.

DT: Yawth was a very sweet depiction of how we and the people we knew experienced Thessaloniki at the time. I saw it again recently. The film treats its characters with a lot of love, and I like that because I feel that we loved ourselves back then. All our films draw from our own experience. This film captures what was a typical student night for us in Thessaloniki, with social media very present in our lives. We already had Iro Aidoni and Maria Laskaridou working on the production, but the team gradually grew stronger with the addition of our fellow students and some people we knew. From the very beginning, Lida and I wanted to make cinema for the general public, like the films we grew up with but from a new directorial perspective. We were naïve, like every new filmmaker, and our enthusiasm paid off.

Festival acclaim

DT: I still remember the moment I opened my email and read that we were accepted to the Drama International Short Film Festival. There was no student section at the time, so it was rare for student films to get accepted. We didn’t expect it. It felt like going to Cannes. Yawth was a big hit in Drama. From the beginning, we believed in the film and thought it would put us on the map, which it actually did. There were no Greek films of this genre at that time. And it feels like they were really needed.

The appeal of a pop cinema addressed to younger generations

LV: The main thing for us is for our films to be grounded on experience. To tell our own stories. We want to grow together with our characters. The concerns we had in our twenties are different from the ones we have now. We don’t define or label what we do, and don’t care to use descriptions of the type “a pop cinema for our generation”.

DT: Without realizing, our characters help us evolve. They are our way of processing what we experience, a kind of therapy. We’re glad that this has started a trend and are fully aware of the marketing part of the business. We’re glad that directorial duos are now gathering attention. After the Daniels and the success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, there is a lot of interest and a lot of space for directors working together.

The stakes of the first feature film

LV and DT: Our first feature film is a splatter horror film. Friends Birthday’s Murder Etc and it’s a coming-of-age film — basically a slasher in the woods. It’s still in the early stages, we just got funding from the Greek Film Center. We’re also working on another short film, scheduled to come out in October. We can’t announce the title yet, but we can say it’s a summer film and that it’s the first one we’re doing with such a big cast. It will be a summer fling. Once the film comes out, those who have seen our previous work will surely recognize many elements but in a different context, more grown up.

Good Girls Club A Virginity Odyssey, Lida Vartzioti & Dimitris Tsakaleas, 2023

The challenge of finding the right cast

LV: For our early films, we casted mostly non-professional actors that we liked, who we though fitted the image we had in our heads, but also established professionals who trusted us in our first steps, such as Georgina Liosi, Romanna Lobach, Elsa Lekakou and Natasa Exidaveloni (heart to all of them). In our more recent work, we often do casting calls but it’s a process that’s uncomfortable for everyone. We get very anxious trying to do things right, since people take time out of their lives to send you photos and their personal details, so it’s a process that needs to be done carefully and with a lot of respect for others. Because we work with images, we try to find actors who fit that image.

Cinema as a path to self-improvement

DT: After Yawth’s screening in Drama, its success and the Greek Film Center’s contribution made things easier for us for Sad Girl Weekend, which was already in pre-production. We were aware of its success, but we weren’t really affected by it. Our main concern is to improve and learn something new with every film we make. We want our next work to be always better than the previous one. Our goal is to make a living as filmmakers. We are always nervous to see how well our film will do, if it will travel to international festivals. Our nervousness was even more pronounced in the third film, Literal Legend, which came after the international success of Sad Girl Weekend. We’ve learned to live with that stress and we’re slowly shedding it. Eventually, every film finds its home.

The elitism of arthouse cinema

LV: The type of cinema we make appeals to the general public. Outside Greece, in particular, people don’t expect this from Greek filmmakers. In Greek and international festivals, this type of crowd-pleasers are considered somewhat inferior in quality, which is sad and unfair. However, crowd-pleasing films also express something of our culture in a tangible manner.

DT: When Lida and I turn forty, I don’t think the main characters of our films will be in their twenties. We’ll be talking about people in their forties, and how they experience life in their forties. We’ve tried to include characters who are older than us, but we’ve decided against that for the moment.

Τhe greatest recognition of all

LV: It fills us with joy when we find ourselves surrounded by people who don’t know us personally and get asked if we have heard of Sad Girl Weekend. We find it very rewarding that people of our generation are familiar with our films. We are, of course, happy when critics express a positive opinion about our films but the most important thing for us is to feel good about our work once filming is over.

The challenges of making cinema in Greece

DT: We live in a country where the process of making and financing films forces directors to treat their work as a hobby. This is the most acute problem. So I understand the anger. I too am angry. Some of us don’t want to work in advertising to make a living, and that’s perfectly respectable. Also, as very few projects get funded, there are many filmmakers who spend years making short films without getting the chance to do a feature. Funding resources are limited and once established mechanisms fail to work there’s a domino effect that prevents you from moving forward.

The prospects of working outside Greece

LV: We considered moving abroad before the pandemic. We considered giving it a shot. We would have loved to work in other countries as directors, but since relocating to Athens, we found a new appreciation for what there is here. As we were already going somewhere with our films here, we didn’t want to lose everything we had built. However, we would like the idea of filming abroad while being based in Athens.

Future Goals

LV: What we want more than anything is to make films. We want our films to be screened in many theatres and we want these theatres to be packed. We don’t care much about what people will say about our work, or about whether it will define or redefine something. We grew up with what people call mainstream cinema, so we want to make films that teenagers and young people can identify with, that speak to them in their own language.

Streaming vs. movie theatre

DV: Streaming is the organic evolution of the movie theatre. Cinema runs no risk of dying from it. Our generation would have trouble believing that. Streaming is one thing, the movie theater another. There are people who don’t have access to cinemas, older people or people in rural areas where not all films are shown. It’s a bit elitist to say that you only see films in the cinema or that you want your films to be shown only in cinemas. We grew up in the countryside. People often complain that a film is shown in only one cinema in Athens, but outside Athens they are not shown at all. If it weren’t for streaming, some films would never reach viewers. We see the point, but we can’t really understand why everyone is getting so upset over this. Culture can fit into many different contexts.

Dimitris Tsakaleas and Lida Vartzioti are a directing duo working on film, commercials and TV. Their films have travelled to film festivals around the world (Karlovy Vary IFF, Palm Springs Shortfest, Cairo IFF, Sarajevo IFF, Norwegian Short IFF, Trieste IFF, Braunschweig lFF, etc) and were screened at Directors Notes, CINOBO. They have been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS and are alumni from Sarajevo & Berlinale Talents.

Tassos Chatzieffraimidis is a lawyer and a freelance writer based in Athens. He currently works as a film curator at Cinobo, a digital platform dedicated to independent and arthouse cinema.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

When your first feature film snatches six awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, plays continuously for more than five months in cinemas and wins 10 awards (out of a record number of 17 nominations) in the recent Iris Awards of the Greek Film Academy, including Best Picture and Best Director, then you can be pretty sure you have directed the film of the year and the undisputed favourite to represent Greece in the nominations for the upcoming International Oscar.

Asimina Proedrou’s Behind the Haystacks confirmed the expectations created by Red Hulk, the first short film she directed in 2013, proving that one doesn’t necessarily have to choose between commercial and art cinema and that a strong story told through a confident and mature directorial vision can pave the way to a poignant, nuanced and ambitious neo-realistic drama which can appeal to international audiences while addressing topical and thorny issues of the Greek society — for example, the refugee problem and the financial crisis.

The director and SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2022) in Moving Image talked to us about her journey and the challenges a young filmmaker faces in order to realize her artistic vision both in Greece and abroad.

Behind the Haystacks (video still), Asimina Proedrou, 2022

The beginning of it all

I too have a very cliché story to tell about how I fell in love with cinema. When I was ten, I watched Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso on TV and started telling everyone that I wanted to be a film director. I was completely fascinated by the world of cinema. In high school, I went to see Kiarostami’s Τhrough the Olive Groves, but as we had to leave the theatre unexpectedly, for many years to come I couldn’t remember which film it was that had captivated me to that extent. When I was in high school, it was not yet possible to receive a higher education in cinema — the first university department was founded later, in Thessaloniki — and then there was the typical fear of my parents about getting involved with the arts. So for reasons that even I don’t understand, I ended up at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and even did a postgraduate degree there. I worked for fourteen years in the private sector as an economist. I started studying film while I was working. With the first film project I made at school, a short film called Facets of Loneliness, I earned a scholarship. My teacher, Antonis Kokkinos, even told me to work on the sound and submit it to festivals. When Elektra Venaki organized an online festival, this is exactly what I did. Facets of Loneliness won the Audience Award. The prize — among other things — included a scholarship to pursue further studies. At the second school I attended, I completed Red Hulk and immediately afterwards I did a Master’s in directing, where I began writing Behind the Haystacks.

Red Hulk (poster) , Asimina Proedrou, 2013

Red Hulk and first moment of recognition

The concept for the film came about when Dimitris Panagiotatos, a teacher at the school I was attending at the time, gave us three-minute exercises on murder as assignments. As I have long been preoccupied with xenophobia and racism, my idea was to propose something on racist violence. This exercise became the beginning of the film, the first few minutes of the film. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I wanted to say something else, that I wanted to explore how far people are prepared to go in order to feel that they belong somewhere. The success the film had in Drama International Short Film Festival is not really something I expected, but I certainly did try tooth and nail.

The inspiration for Behind the Haystacks

The original inspiration for the film, back in 2014, was to explore how everyday people get caught up in a system of corruption. From the beginning, I had the idea to develop three different points of view from member of the same family. Around that time, a friend happened to talk to me about Lake Doiran, which I had never visited. I googled it, saw photos of the place, and realized I had found my filming location. I just upped and left, and travelled to Lake Doiran to do research. At the time, the hotel in the area was hosting thirty Syrian refugees. I saw the way the local community treated them and visited Idomeni. That’s how Behind the Haystacks started taking shape.

Behind the Haystacks (video still), Asimina Proedrou, 2022

The time-consuming and demanding process of making such an ambitious film

The first draft of Behind the Haystacks was completed at the end of 2015 and the proposal to the Hellenic Centre was submitted in 2017. We participated in various script labs in Sarajevo, Berlin, First Film First, and the script was constantly changing shape. Shooting began and was completed during the second lockdown, the first months of 2021. I think I was completely unaware of the danger, though, as a general rule, I find challenges exciting. We had a good budget for a first-time director’s film, but the demands of the script were enormous. We set up fifty different locations, tried to create an entire camp with just seventeen tents, and performed incredible magic tricks to ensure the film’s production value. The choice of framing was, to be sure, linked to the financial constraints we faced. However, it was also a stylistic choice that I feel responded fully to the needs of the narrative.

The difference between shooting a short film and a feature

The scale is just completely different. The first difference is how long it takes to shoot. In the case of Red Hulk, it took just seven days. For Behind the Haystacks, it took thirty-three. But filming itself is also completely different. While shooting Haystacks, I lived for months in a rhythm of the utmost creativity and excitement. We worked non-stop, with very few hours of sleep and ten-hour filming sessions per day that required absolute concentration from shot to shot. After filming was over, we had to resolve countless technical and artistic issues, constantly revising and improving things. But in all this incredible alertness, you don’t even notice the fatigue.

Behind the Haystacks (video still), Asimina Proedrou, 2022

The perfectionism of the final cut

I’m too much of a perfectionist. I think, if they’d let me, I’d never finish the film. Luckily, though, in this life there are deadlines and budgets to observe. Post-production was also a very demanding process. Because of the complex narrative of the film and the a triple point of view that frames it, we tested the reactions of viewers, friends and acquaintances to understand what people actually make of the film, whether they are used to watching more challenging films or not. We wanted to find out whether what we wanted to say was getting through. We made several changes in that direction. To give you an example, when the film was almost finished, we decided to add the intermediate titles “Chapter I”, “Chapter II”, “Chapter III”, and “Epilogue”, to make it clearer to a wider audience that the film is divided into three parts, representing different points of view. Another important change was that we changed the English subtitles to make the film more accessible to international audiences. I have often thought about how much we, in Greece, understand when we watch foreign films, and how much the subtitles take away from the film.

Festivals and distribution: a difficult equation

Usually, a Greek film tries its luck at the big international festivals for a year, and then completes its course in Thessaloniki. In our case, because of Covid and the enormous pressure it put on the market, we took the bold and unorthodox decision to premiere in Thessaloniki instead of sitting around and waiting for an entire year.
We are very pleased we did so. What we certainly didn’t expect in Thessaloniki was the response of the people. Not only did the film fill the theatres, but nobody left during the Q&A session held after the first screening, and there was an incredible feeling of excitement and enthusiasm both inside the theatre and when we came out.
Then came the awards and all the buzz from the Thessaloniki festival, which created a word of mouth that helped get the film to a wider audience. Behind the Haystacks was released in 35 theaters in its first week, a number I personally found daunting at first but, in retrospect, it looks like it was the right decision.
I feel that we are expected to work in a market where stereotypes and strict distinctions between commercial and art cinema abound, and where anything that deviates from what is considered customary is met with suspicion and reluctance. The market — especially the international market — is comfortable operating with relative safety without deviating particularly from already existing norms. Of course, within this context, there is a part of the market that takes many more risks.

The discussion about female gaze in cinema

I believe that every filmmaker has their own perspective. Clearly, there are biological factors that will determine how they choose or approach their subjects, but this is not as clear-cut. I don’t always agree with the way the discussion on the female gaze is conducted. There are male filmmakers who approach “female” issues with sensitivity and empathy, women who approach “male” issues with similar sensitivity, and others who simply reproduce a male perception of what it means to have a female gaze. In any case, I think there are as many perspectives as there are people.

Future plans

I’m already developing the scripts for two features films and the pilot for a mini-series. I believe that series can be an area through which to expand the narrative language, especially in terms of character development. What I’m interested in is ensuring the quality of my work. I’m not interested, at least for now, in doing something abroad, because Greece is where my subjects are and I want to make Greek films. How can I develop characters from cultures I don’t know? Why would I talk about a family in Germany? What would my artistic motive be if I were to do something like this?

The struggle of being a filmmaker in Greece

The problem in Greece, as always, is that you can’t make a living just by doing cinema. It’s very, very difficult to make ends meet by making a film every three, five, or seven years. I would like to be able to make beautiful films and live off them. I think that’s an extremely ambitious goal — possibly unattainable.

Survival kit for young filmmakers

I don’t like to give advice because everyone draws their own course and is free to do what they want. Not to mention that there are many paths and many different ways which can get you where you want to be. I would tell young filmmakers to keep their originality intact and not be influenced by others. Then again, if they don’t want to, that’s their right too. I don’t know… forget the bit about originality. It just takes a whole lot of patience and effort, that’s all.

Asimina Proedrou was born in 1982, in Athens, Greece. She studied music (2001), economics (BA in 2005 and MSc in 2007, both from the Athens University of Economics and Business) and film directing (BA awarded by the Athens Metropolitan College in 2013, and MA from Staffordshire University in 2016). Her short film, Red Hulk (2013), which she wrote, directed and produced herself during her undergraduate studies, was awarded a Golden Dionysus at the Drama International Short Film Festival (2013) and won the Best Short Film Award at the 2013 Athens International Film Festival. Red Hulk was officially selected for more than sixty international film festivals, including the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (International Competition, 2014), winning nine awards in total. Her debut feature film Behind the Haystacks, scheduled to be released in 2022, has been developed through the programs Script Station — Talents Sarajevo (2015); Script Station — Talents Berlinale (2016); and First Film First Goethe-Institut Young Directors Academy (2016–2017), while it has also won a development grant by the French Centre National du cinéma et de l’Image animée at the Crossroads Co-production Forum of the 57th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The film is a Greek/German/North Macedonian co-production, supported, among others, by the following organizations and programs: Greek Film Center, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, Creative Europe Media, Southern Eastern Europe Cinema Network, the North Macedonian Film Agency, ZDF-Arte and the EU cultural support fund Eurimages. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).

Tassos Chatzieffraimidis is a lawyer and a freelance writer based in Athens. He currently works as a film curator at Cinobo, a digital platform dedicated to independent and arthouse cinema.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Araceli Lemos’ double nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards (John Cassavetes, Someone to Watch awards) for her debut feature film Holy Emy, are the most recent distinctions achieved by the SNF ARTWORKS Moving Image Fellow 2019, who had previously received a special mention at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival and won the Iris Award for Best Director from the Hellenic Film Academy.

One of the best and most promising directorial debuts of recent years, not only in Greece but also internationally, Holy Emy is a confident and daring film blending coming-of-age drama and body horror in order to reveal and map an unknown part of the modern Greek reality: that of the Filipino immigrant community. The story is told with the clarity of vision which is typical of every film of Araceli, a radical filmmaker who had already gained valuable experience as an editor working on the films of Panagiotis Evangelidis and who had already explored the internal conflicts of multiculturalism with Miguel Alvarez Wears a Wig, her first short film produced on the other side of the Atlantic.

Now residing primarily in Los Angeles, where she completed her postgraduate studies in cinema, Araceli is currently writing her second feature film. In this interview, she takes us on an adventurous journey through the world of the moving image and talks to us about her charmingly unclassifiable cinema and of the need to redefine both the viewer’s and the creator’s gaze in a world that is constantly shifting.

Introductions

I am a director, screenwriter and editor. I studied economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, but as I wanted to do something more creative I decided to take some film courses at New York College in Athens. I think the decision to go into cinema took its final shape while I was doing my Erasmus in Paris. I had been watching films since a young age but I didn’t consider myself a film buff until I went to Paris. There I could watch films all day long. I had no practical sense of what making a film entailed until Pantelis Voulgaris suggested I join his son, Alexandros, as crew on the filming of Pink. Together with Konstantinos Antonopoulos we worked as script supervisors but we also did all kinds of jobs. That’s where I saw for the first time what it is like to actually make a film. Then I made a short film and prepared my portfolio to apply for a Master’s Degree in the US.

First steps as a film director

I made some short films as a student, just me and my camera. Χ-mas 2008 was shot when I came back to Athens. My return coincided with the aftermath of Alexandros Grigoropoulos’ murder, a very turbulent moment in the city’s recent history.

I discovered that it is possible to make films on your own, just with your camera and a computer. I learned editing hands-on and that helped me discover what I am interested in making films about. Until then I was used to studying on a more theoretical level. My second film, Debbie and Janice as The Maids, was based on The Maids by Jean Genet and the way our obsessive rehearsals with my two actresses for a year in a suburban house in Burbank, California mirrored the play. And then I made my thesis film at CalArts, Miguel Alvarez Wears A Wig.

A film director’s discovery of America

Through the camera I attempted to understand America and familiarize myself with my new environment. I wanted to interact with my new surroundings and filmmaking was my way in. Los Angeles is so close to Mexico. Spanish is as common a language as English there and I found myself feeling very comfortable within the Mexican culture, maybe more comfortable than the Anglo-saxon one. I wanted the film to be set at America’s border with Mexico, even though I was warned that this was very dangerous. I also was aware that I was a newcomer and an outsider who had no choice but to film from a distance and this added for me a mythical dimension to the project. Although criminality rates were high, I was ignorant of the risks involved. I think my innocence kept me safe. It was the first film I sent to a festival.

The love for editing

Editing was my entry point into understanding directing and screenwriting. A great chapter in my life and in my development as a filmmaker has been collaborating with Panagiotis Evangelidis, whom I have known since my childhood. While I was studying cinema, he shot Chip & Ovi in Romania without even being certain if he would turn his material into a film.

I offered to do the editing because I was fascinated by the characters, but I didn’t know how to edit yet. I was motivated to learn so that I could take this on. Eventually I got an assistant director credit and, most importantly, I edited his subsequent films: The Life and Death of Celso Junior, They Glow in the Dark and Irving Park. What I find exciting about editing is that you can use it to write a story. It’s like writing a script with images. Especially when I work with other directors, getting inside the other person’s head and agreeing or disagreeing with their choices is revealing about your own directorial approach, especially in fiction. I like the process of collaboration and the different perspective someone else can bring to something you’ve thought of in a different way.

Holy Emy

Holy Emy was an adventure. My original inspiration came when I read Yuko Ogawa’s Pregnancy Diaries. I wanted to make a film about two sisters, one of whom is pregnant while the other one (the main character, Emy) is closely observing her. As the story evolved in my mind, it got enveloped with mystery and infused with a secret. When I decide to make a film, I want it to be the beginning of a journey for me. At first, I had a hard time finding what I wanted to film in Athens, a city I thought I knew well, since I wanted to be surprised, to be led to places I have never seen before. I was looking for ways for my hyper realistic story to feel grounded in reality and I decided to place it in the Filipino immigrant community in Athens. In a world like this, closed in on itself, there could very well exist a girl that is special and kept a secret. In the church, I discovered a whole new world, completely unfamiliar to me in a context I considered familiar. Then the script took a completely new turn and was enriched with my own personal experiences. I took a long time to develop the story together with my scriptwriter Giulia Caruso. It ended up being such a demanding film — involving amateur actors, special effects and locations — that I needed to go to the shoot with a very detailed and complete script, without room for improvisation. My cinematographer Ki Jin Kim and I saw the images we had in mind for a long time come to life exactly as we had pictured them. I wanted to make a fiction film that offered more than the richness of documentary, so we tried to use the camera to invent a new language that served the supernatural elements of the story.

The risky venture of casting

Finding the right lead was key for the film. We started casting and auditions before securing financing because we knew it would take a long time to find Emy. I had been visiting the Filipino community for many years, but there was a very delicate balance, I couldn’t just start filming or doing auditions. I had to earn their trust and be discreet, I couldn’t impose my own story and reject the truth that I found there. But the whole community was tremendously generous with me and I enjoyed every moment, especially the parties they hold after the service. If we hadn’t found Abigael, we wouldn’t be able to make this film. There was even the thought of bringing in an actress from the Philippines, but that way the story would lose its way. Because that’s the whole point of the film, the extent — and ways — in which Emy has lost her connection to her homeland but a huge part of her heritage lives inside her.

Multicultural Greece

Emy is a second-generation immigrant who was born and raised in this country. There is a misconception by a majority of Greeks that Greece consists only of white, Christian Greek natives but there is much more to it, rendering they country far more interesting. I am very interested in individuals who experience the clash of cultures within themselves and feel like they don’t belong or fit in anywhere. We all have a part of us that doesn’t belong.

Embraced by the Locarno festival

Locarno is an iconic festival for me and I love many of the films that have been screened there. What pleased me the most was that the festival admitted my film into its universe, as Locarno embraces the most experimental and idiosyncratic aspects of contemporary cinema production. When you’re making a film as a new director, you don’t know where exactly your own vocabulary stands. This was a vindication for me, I felt welcomed by a world I’m happy to belong to.

Iris Award for Best Director

Being awarded the Hellenic Film Academy’s Best Director Award is a great honour, as you feel like you’ve earned the recognition of the people in your field — especially so when it’s for your first film. I was especially happy to receive the award from Panos Koutras and Konstantina Kotzamanis, whose work I have admired for years.

On the value of winning prizes

I don’t believe that awards add something to the film. There are films which are true gems and haven’t received any awards, they are completely unknown. The most important thing is to feel that your film is exactly how you imagined it. Winning awards is mainly helpful for future projects and for making your work more widely known, so it can be communicated to more people. It’s important that your film reaches the people you intend it for. It is very touching to have someone come up to you and say they appreciate something that had been brewing in your imagination for a long time.

The difficulties of the Greek film production sector

I belong to a new generation of filmmakers and, through this film, I’ve experienced first-hand the problems οf producing a film in Greece. One of the main reasons why Holy Emy took so long to complete was the financial crisis. It’s terribly stressful to have to wait and see how the limited available resources will end up being allocated, and how long this will take. In international co-productions there are timelines and strict deadlines and waiting to receive the support coming from the Centre can derail any project. In the past, less money was given to more productions and the red tape and time spent seeking funds from alternative sources was an exhausting process. Foreign colleagues and collaborators wonder how we can make films in Greece with such a small budgets. But maybe this unlocks our creativity and makes us more inventive.

Defying categorization

I do not determine in advance the form that each of my films will take, which genre it will belong to. Each stage of preparation is a point in time and only at the end can you go back and see the line linking them to each other. It is a common trait among critics to focus on some best-known creators when defining regional cinema. I don’t find this stifling. We all have common experiences and it’s interesting to see what has crept into our films or characters. As far as I’m concerned, I draw inspiration from my own experiences. An external observer could find more similarities and characteristics linking the films to each other.

Female Gaze and redefining our way of seeing

I find it very refreshing that female filmmakers are interested in body horror and experimenting with genres, offering new perspectives and different sensibilities. For years we’ve been raised as viewers with a male directorial gaze and for some it’s hard to shed that mold still used to appreciate films. A new voice should be allowed space to express itself and you have to be open when discussing its specificity.

Araceli Lemos (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is a Greek writer, director and editor born in Athens, Greece and currently based in Los Angeles. Her debut feature Holy Emy received a Special Mention Jury Award at Locarno 2021, and was released by MUBI. Araceli won Best Director at the 2022 Hellenic Film Academy Awards where Holy Emy received a leading 15 nominations.

Tassos Chatzieffraimidis is a lawyer and a freelance writer based in Athens. He currently works as a film curator at Cinobo, a digital platform dedicated to independent and arthouse cinema.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

— Robert Frost, For Once, Then, Something

Pure abstraction has a long history in cinema. Some of the earliest moving images — made with the stroboscope or phénakisticope — were nothing more than simple lines and shapes brought into flickering life. Yet amidst even the most basic stirrings of movement, we look for meaning. It is impossible to watch a film, to follow something closely with our eyes and our minds, and not attach some significance or feeling to its rhythms. Indeed, this elemental search lies at the core of the work of filmmaker and artist Loukianos Moshonas. Grounding his narratives in the specific, yet universal, mundanities of everyday life, Loukianos reveals our tireless attempts to make sense of the world, all while recognizing that absolute certainty will forever remain just beyond our grasp.

Loukianos was born in Athens to a French mother and Greek father. Educated in the city’s French school, his greatest passion growing up was not film, but skateboarding. Driven by his love for the sport, he chose to pursue studies at the National Art School of Lyon, his decision stemming not from any particularly strong affinities to the university (or even to art, he thought), but rather to Lyon itself, one of the skating capitals of Europe. Soon enough, though, art school took him by surprise. As he began to immerse himself in both the history and practice of art, he found himself challenged by his studies in a way he had never before experienced. Creating art, especially video art, quickly became his guiding obsession.

From there, the vast world of film beckoned. Drawing on the bottomless devotion of the freshly converted, he absorbed everything he could about this visual and narrative craft. He dedicated himself to darkened cinemas, faithfully taking in two films per day. His intense absorption into the medium was no accident — it spoke to the immediacy of cinema, its direct ability to capture life itself. Loukianos says, “When shooting, you depend so much on the real — its hazards, accidents, chance. With a fine scalpel, you cut into these infinitesimal nuances. Sitting in front of a screen, you see a culture and its filters as thin as possible; you’re a hostage of this presence. You laugh, you cry, you’re melancholic: no choice. Both are terrifying.” When art school concluded, Loukianos moved to Paris, the longtime capital of his new passion. There, he continued his studies at Le Fresnoy, a film school where clear-cut narratives and high-end productions are deliberately disdained in favor of formal experimentation and the search for ways of challenging cinematic conventions.

As Loukianos narrativizes and compresses his formative years, a pattern clearly emerges — what is obsession if not a search for meaning? We pour ourselves into something, expecting that somehow our efforts will eventually be rewarded. Perhaps not financially, but at least intellectually or socially or emotionally, or, most fundamentally, by granting us a sense of purpose. When Loukianos began his artistic career, he had more than enough obsession to drive him, but he had to find a way to convey that same meaning to his viewers through his work. Indeed, the first two projects that Loukianos produced during and after his time at Le Fresnoy followed a similar arc. They took shape slowly, at their own pace, striving to find a satisfying form — a process reflected in their own narratives.

The first film tells the initially mundane story of two programmers working side by side in a drab office. At the beginning, they stare at their screens and click aimlessly, the creative process made dull and empty by the numbing atmosphere. As viewers, we stare at the screen and watch the two men stare at their own screens in return. We recognize in them the daily alienation of our own speech, and our own bodies, illuminated by the numbing glow of technology. But slowly, as the two men begin to engage in deeper conversation, something clicks into life. Loukianos describes how, “This pair of young men brainstorm together, allowing their minds to travel.” Soon, we join them on their journey and discover an ambiguous digital image on one of the character’s computer screens. Somewhere in the swirl of pixels, there lies a referent to something, but the men can’t seem to agree what it could be. Meanwhile, in the real world, Loukianos himself confronted the same problem as his characters. He cut and cut his film, but like the ambiguous squiggle that his characters debated, it refused to resolve with conclusive clarity. He completed this short, but the shadow of a larger feature seemed to beckon from within.

The first film tells the initially mundane story of two programmers working side by side in a drab office. At the beginning, they stare at their screens and click aimlessly, the creative process made dull and empty by the numbing atmosphere. As viewers, we stare at the screen and watch the two men stare at their own screens in return. We recognize in them the daily alienation of our own speech, and our own bodies, illuminated by the numbing glow of technology. But slowly, as the two men begin to engage in deeper conversation, something clicks into life. Loukianos describes how, “This pair of young men brainstorm together, allowing their minds to travel.” Soon, we join them on their journey and discover an ambiguous digital image on one of the character’s computer screens. Somewhere in the swirl of pixels, there lies a referent to something, but the men can’t seem to agree what it could be. Meanwhile, in the real world, Loukianos himself confronted the same problem as his characters. He cut and cut his film, but like the ambiguous squiggle that his characters debated, it refused to resolve with conclusive clarity. He completed this short, but the shadow of a larger feature seemed to beckon from within.

Meanwhile, in 2013, Loukianos was called back to Athens after having spent nearly a decade in France. Growing up in Greece, Loukianos had often felt that his bilingual upbringing was some kind of deficiency, a feeling of foreignness that followed him everywhere he went. While this was a problem, it was also a spur: he questioned everything, from language, to work, to our most basic social, historical, and political assumptions. When he began making films, this eternally outside perspective became an asset; he found himself drawn to tell stories and create characters who were also searching for their place in the world.

Once more, then, Loukianos’ life reflected in his art. In Athens, he began renovating an old family apartment with the help of a more technically skilled contractor, born in Albania. As the two worked and got to know each other, Loukianos saw the outlines of a new project. Soon, they were collaborating not only on the renovation, but on a film, titled Manodopera, in which Loukianos portrays a young Greek man working together with an older Albanian to refurbish an apartment. The scenes of demolition and reconstruction are intercut with ones on the roof of the same building, where Loukianos’ character sits with a group of friends overlooking the city. Amidst the descending darkness, the men discuss Greece, politics, and their existential worries about the future. Above and below, we find characters seeking to create structures; all of them outsiders, in different ways, alienated from their surroundings. Through their labor, they attempt to carve out a sense of ownership or belonging, but even work is an uncertain refuge.

Still the practical project advances, and we watch as the apartment is steadily transformed. Yet in the circuitous conversations on the roof, the theoretical efforts languish. As Loukianos tells me, “The youths slowly succumb to a melancholic state where they realize they have no answers. Their conversation is not a quest for truth but simply a confrontation with the real — that is, their ongoing state of confusion. Over the course of the film, they talk into the night and the darkness becomes totally black. At the end, they are floating in the sky, in a void, an untethered state.” He then explains, “To me, this film suggests a navigation amidst boundless information and opportunity, while facing an emptiness and existential uncertainty. It seems like the earth underneath our feet is slipping, causing us to lose our balance. We drink too much and stumble across bits and pieces of answers, but only end up in a jumbled frame of mind.”

It is here that I ask Loukianos about the process of editing, imposing structure on films that themselves admit to the challenge of finding meaning. What did he do when he found himself at temporary impasses while working on these two projects? It takes Loukianos a moment to gather his thoughts. “When you have a lot of footage, it’s like trying to find a diamond amidst the muck. But with persistence, you condense the meaning and bring out the beauty for which you are searching.” He then continues in more concrete detail, “It also depends on the film. In the case of Manodopera, I kept pushing the material further because I imagined something better. In fact, it was only after I fleshed out my idea for a feature-length structure that I could go back and produce the short version. Once I did that, I felt a breakthrough.” After a pause, unprompted, he offers another thought, “I’ve slowly accepted that this journey is all part of the creative process. It’s as if the films themselves are searching for their own form. Their structure is not sleek and direct. Instead, I allow my films breath. I have a strange love for editing — a love that lets the process shine through. My editing is not asphyxiating nor perfect, but open and ongoing.”

As he speaks, I realize that Loukianos, unlike so many filmmakers and visual artists, is less interested in showing us the final results of his imagination, but rather, revealing the very process of imagining. It is engrossing but also a struggle: with all its breaths, and messiness, and pauses, and roundabout detours.

When I suggest this to him, he agrees and elaborates, “I like the belief that once you are able to think about something, it’s already palpable; you can almost touch it. The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick said once you have the idea, that already means it’s possible. The fact it could form into an idea at all shows there is a way to make it happen.” From Kubrick, he turns his reflections inward, “My own films work a lot with storytelling through speech, the power of fabulation. Spoken words can be convincing, seductive, capable of transporting us to other places. They are so enchanting [envoûtant] that they pull you inside before you know it. I am interested in the range of possibilities produced by speech, rather than any single realization through the image. I often prefer storytellers to the story itself; imagining can be more evocative than seeing.”

As Loukianos speaks, it is easy to nod along. Yet his words seem odd for a filmmaker, an art form so linked with the image. Why does he choose to work with a camera if speech is so powerful? He is ready with an answer. “I really mistrust the image. Instead, I double my faith in the expressive tool of speech and sound. It’s like the filmmaker Robert Bresson once said (roughly), ‘The ear goes to fetch things that the eye does not. If you see a picture of a train station, you don’t do any work. If you hear the sound of the train station, you imagine not one or two trains, but maybe a dozen of them. You picture in your mind the rush of hundreds of people and suddenly you are immersed in an entire world. The eye is lazy while sound runs much more deeply.’ I fully agree — sound is both rich and elusive. Images make so much available right on the surface; sounds invite you in for more.” He continues, passionately, “Everyone says eyes are the windows to the soul. But for me, the window to the soul is one’s voice. You can’t fake it: it’s too fragile, it trembles and derails your intentions. Likewise, any image you see on a screen is necessarily fake; you look and know that it has only two dimensions. But sound fills the air, it envelops you. When someone whispers in a cinema, you can feel their lips moving in your ear. That’s why I love sounds and voices. The voice of the character brings you into their world.”

He then winds down his defense of the auditory in film with the following reflection: “Think about the old adage, ‘Show, don’t tell.’ That’s the rule and you’ll find it on every bullshit list on how to tell stories. But it’s not true, or at least, it’s very dogmatic. The idea is that we find everything through the body and our sensory experiences. But think about it: we are constantly searching through words. We talk in order to make meaning. The mystery becomes the telling, our challenge is to find some truth within the profusion.”

Being a writer — and in this case, an interviewer — Loukianos’ own words resonate with me deeply. But before we conclude, I push Loukianos to apply this perspective to his film Manodopera. The entire film represents a search for truth, but via two separate means: speech, yes, but also action. While the men on the roof circle around their goal, the narrative is driven most by the muscular activity of destroying and rebuilding. Loukianos explains, “At the center of the story is the relationship between a Greek and an Albanian; their collaboration creates a dyadic attraction. I’m interested in the idea of two figures, from very different backgrounds, coming together through the building process. For a moment, their relationship evolves within a utopia, much as the philosophical discussions above seem to exist in a parallel reality. But in both cases, in order for anything to really change, they must reach down to the roots of the problem. In the case of the apartment, they destroy what’s on the surface to find the stronger foundations below. And in the larger society, all the characters must confront how in order to truly fix anything requires a painful process; durable change demands a dialectic of creation, destruction, and finally, reconstruction.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

“And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, 
I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Dylan Thomas

There is an eerie sense of time dilation in certain stages of a day. At dawn, before human activity comes through the window or at “a beautiful dusk that enhances everything[1]”. During those times, presence acquires a self-consciousness that renders meaning-making the only noteworthy pursuit. These moments allow a mimesis of a child-like experience of time; not as a chronological sequence of events but rather as an inconsequential collection of moments that offer endless opportunities for seeing, discovering, considering in order to finally make sense, directed by nothing other than empiricism. Jacqueline Lentzou’s directing is determined to feature exactly that fleeting quality. Her films seem less as the unfolding of a linear narrative and more as a presentation of conditions on which life occurs. The treatment of time in her filmography enforces a widening of the spectrum in order to make room for the magnitude of the instant. The seated viewer is given the space to take on a hyper-real presence of re-seeing, re-discovering, re-considering.

The events that are committed to the screen offer strategically selected cases to examine this dilation of time. The death of a loved one, the telling of one’s dream, the living out of the last day of the year function as occasions in which time slows down and one is dragged into a retrospective funnel. Within that funnel what takes place is an otherworldly fusion of past and present, of memory and occurence, of knowledge and emotion which is aroused by nature’s irreverence towards the human need for structure and reason.

Fox (2016) starts out with the sound of a child reading an Aesopic fable, the echo of which tellingly morphs into the intense lyrics of a Greek hip hop song. It is a coming-of-age story of a teenage boy that also reads as an ethnographic study of contemporary Greek society class divisions and their respective gender stereotypes. The protagonist’s adolescent machismo is flexed as he enacts the patriarch role to his younger siblings and girlfriend, simulating the traditional family structure. As they are playing house, the actual grown-up, the mother escapes the restraints of motherhood with a Thelma-and-Louise abandon. The home is activated playfully while the mom recklessly flees it. The events of the film take place in a non-descript time period that renders them timeless. The film is heavily populated by time signifiers in the form of songs, tv series and fashion trends that bridge intergenerational distances similar to the passing of the torch of transgenerational trauma. The continuous phone ringing that remains systematically unanswered delays action until the characters have grown complete in their inadequacy to face the next stage of life. Loyal to its genre, it’s a story of loss as much as it is a story of beginnings.

A sense of voyeurism is induced when listening to someone describe their dreams. It’s an intimacy, between teller and listener, that most are not comfortable with. The initially masked but ultimately unresisting disclosure of subconscious fear, angst and desire, oftentimes unadmitted even to oneself, is a study in the metaphysical capacity of otherness. HIWA (2017) is an autonomous dream sequence that is narrated by the dreamer as the viewer is immersed in its visuals. The subtitles of the Filipino language film take on an additional role to translation: they describe what is seen on screen as if words and images are in competition. Lentzou, who also writes the scripts to her films, allows language to accommodate the sense-making process independently, liberating her camera to take on a fragmented blend of imagery instead of a visual representation of the narrative. The effect, often as disorienting as a dream, feels like reading an illustrated poem that deals with the crippling weight of parental responsibility and the liberation from the home in search for the self. The genealogical coincidences that are revealed once again point towards a circular consumption of time, often delineated in the director’s love for circular composition frames. The displacement of the dream is the background and the excuse for the dissociation of the narrator.

In Hector Malot: The last day of the year (2018) a young woman, Sophia, goes about the mundane tasks of a day, walking her dog, hanging out with friends, discussing about horoscopes, getting dressed, telling a joke in what feels like an expanded time-zone. The dialogue scenes were improvised giving a natural feel of reaction timing in discussions. Long, uncut takes that cover a real-life minute suggest that time in the film is being lived, not represented. Nothing renders this day particularly special other than the fact that Sophia goes to a rather banal New Year’s Eve celebration. Throughout the film there is a feeling that she is not living up to the significance of the day, which calls for review and resolution in preparation for the new start. It seems that through her everyday tasks, Sophia is composing herself bit by bit not with the goal of renewal but of continuance. The viewer is dragged into the mantra-like state of these tasks and is offered the time to dissect them into their basic elements, to allow them to exist without additional purpose, consequently allowing the character to exist without a plot. Both character and viewer are free from their imposed duties and permitted to stoically examine without emphasis.

Jacqueline Lentzou films have texture. In her technique, the camera is guiding the audience to scan every surface of the surrounding space, including a luscious representation of natural elements.Textures of plant leaves, animals, human flesh, dewdrops, air particles, dispersed light and every substance, visible or non, are zoomed into and surveyed slowly inch by inch. It’s as if the camera is suspended in time and the world itself moves in front of the lens instead of the other way around. A sensual depiction that provokes a reach-out-and-touch impulse. The urge to extend your hand and touch the objects on the screen, feel them out and even become one with them leads to the attraction of the here and now in all its devastating glory. It’s as if Lentzou’s film-making process has morphed from a representation of life to a guideline for living with a single piece of advice: be here, now.

Evita Tsokanta is an art historian based in Athens who works as a writer, educator and an independent exhibition-maker. She lectures on curatorial practices and contemporary Greek art for the Columbia University Athens Curatorial Summer Program and Arcadia University College of Global Studies. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues and journals and completed a Goethe Institute writing residency in Leipzig, Halle 14.

[1] Albert Camus, The Fall, (Great Britain, Penguin Classics, 2006)

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Christos Massalas is a pleasure to talk to about all matters but most of all cinema. The force of joy that emanates when he describes his projects carries with it a life-affirming vivacity for the art of filmmaking and creativity in general. He is an endless resource of cinematic references that are not limited to the typical obscure mid-century cinematographers a director usually name-drops, but includes mainstream cinema made for popular consumption that you’ve actually seen. A rare treat if you are embarrassingly unsophisticated in art house cinema. The same quality is transported in his body of work. Such a sense of exoneration for wide appeal leaves no space for pretentiousness. His filmography holds the uncommon quality of art film accessibility. A touch of pop culture, a polaroid aesthetic, recognizable 90s references that make you sit up in your seat, are all light-heartedly sprinkled in his work, making the viewer feel at home. At the same time, his filmography deals with sex with a subdued tone which only thinly guises a deadpan humor undertone that feels absolutely in tune with today. A type of bright-colored film noir, if that is even a thing.

Christos Massalas studied filmmaking and film theory at the London Films School and Kingston University where he spent the following years building his creative toolbox. He moved back home to Athens when the Greek debt crisis was starting to hit hard. Some might think of it as an unwise life-choice but he seems entirely unphased by budgeting issues as he manages to make ends meet one way or another. Mostly another. A savvy fundraiser and a convincing ambassador for his practice, Massalas seems like a unicorn in a sector that has been plagued by the misery of ill-equipped infrastructure for film production. He however sounds characteristically optimistic about Greek cinema, as he believes that a glass ceiling that until recently would allow only one native filmmaker to make it big, has been shattered, allowing the diversity of the extremely dynamic Greek cinema of our time to shine. He even goes as far as considering his films unattached to a specific geography, which might be a given for a filmmaker of any other nationality, but not as much for a Greek one. And all that, despite the fact that his first feature film which after years of preparation was set to start filming during what turned out to be the coronavirus induced lockdown in Europe. In fact, he adds with his contagiously good-natured outlook, that covid-19 actually accelerated his production as he managed to make the best of what was given to him, something he has made a habit of.

His directorial approach is as meticulous as to be expected by an artist who is in love with his medium. He makes precise and explicit storyboards for each scene of the film. He oversees every aspect of production, pre and post, to the point of knowing how many Swarovski crystals have been glued onto each costume. Massalas, like the majority of Greek cinema directors, writes his own scripts. He was selected to be part of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2018, for his treatment of his upcoming first feature film, Broadway. The intention behind his scripts is that the themes emerge out of the storytelling, thus activating the viewer to be part of putting the pieces of the puzzle together and deconstructing the topics. He spends a good year and a half rehearsing with his cast. A cast that he is quick to point out, does not consist of established actors, but of fresh, new faces that haven’t had the chance to be typecast. During the long stage of rehearsals, he writes short scripts that allude to character’s traits instead of the final film narrative. He is interested in building relationships with and between cast members in order to actually embody rather than enact. It sounds like he is mostly focused on creating working atmospheres in which narratives will most naturally occur. Why rush when the alternative is to relish in the process?

In his earlier work, Massalas, utilized the medium of short films and music videos to explore his aesthetic with the poetic visuals that were afforded to him thanks to the specific format. In his 2011 Make-up, one sees the first instances of his preoccupation with what he calls the erotic thriller genre. It is a depiction of a casual sexual relation between strangers, a social anthropologist and a make-up artist, that occurs in the span of one night and leaves part of the storytelling hidden in the dark allowing elements of mystery to jumpstart dialogue. Throughout his practice the director is particularly interested in investigating and depicting various notions of masculinity and their fluidity. The differences in sexual behavior in public versus private space offer a fertile ground for that. Massalas proposes that what happens behind closed doors, what in fact remains unseen, is what causes social differences to collapse and reveals one’s authentic nature.

In the music video for Σtella’s, Picking Words song Massalas explores the film noir genre further through the play of shadow and light and the poetic depiction of artificial body parts. Although such imagery could only make sense in the abstraction that is permitted in short films, in Flower and Bottoms (2016) he begins to delve deeper in eroticism and its relation to today’s fragmented self through the storyline. It is indicative of the way he classifies his filmmaking as post-queer. He is interested in the depth that is usually silenced in the film representation of queer characters rather than a single-layered depiction that is limited to a gender label. Visually reminiscent of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, Flowers and Bottoms, has the literal connotation that its’ title points to. A presentation of two individuals, one speechless seen only from the back while watching in the dark a film called Flowers and Bottoms and the other only heard through a series of voice mails addressed to his, presumably estranged, lover. Alluding to the transformation of sexual relations caused by the immediacy and casualty of the popular tinder and grindr dating applications, Massalas furthers his depictions of erotic desire to include the failure of realized intimacy and a haste to move on to the next. It is a visualization of the de-identification of face and body, similar to the faceless characters in the film who ultimately never meet.

Copa-Loca (2017), which was selected in the Cannes Film Festival Directors Fortnight, is a coming of age memoir. The main character is an abandoned, deteriorating water park in the outskirts of Athens. The park is populated by an angsty teenage girl who is seen in a series of emotionless sex scenes with various men while surrounded by lots of bananas. It all feels primal and archetypical. The film is narrated by a character who only enters the screen in the last shot and is barely recognized to be an aged Jenny Hiloudaki, an author and model that became well known in Greece in the 90s for being the first trans gender supermodel. Vilified from the Greek media due to her extramarital affair with a district attorney, she has long disappeared from the public eye. In the film, Hiloudaki portrays the young girl’s mother who attempts to distance her daughter from the waterpark and end her careless sexual escapades. There is a poetic implication which allows the aesthetic distance between reality and fiction to collapse and heighten the sense of the inevitable corporeal scattering in one’s youth. The layered connotations are only multiplied through the soundtrack of samba, electropop and Greek 60s musical scores, adding an ironic yet warm nostalgia into the mix making the theme appear wholesome and universal.

Throughout Massalas’ filmography there is a recurrent motif of playfully representing promiscuity. A sense of reckless abandon that is stereotypically associated with the sexual awakening of young teenagers or the LGBTQ+ community. However, this motif is dealt with in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact tone, stripped from its shock value and not positioned within the spectrum of moralistic judgement. What distinguishes it from a pornographic approach to sex is in fact the subtle humor with which it is filmed along with the fact that it feels all too familiar. Somewhere amongst the rusty colorful waterslides of Copa Loca, one recognizes the circulating decay of what was once highlighted as fun and exciting but now has lost its promised appeal. It is a perfectly balanced illustration of what in Greek is called charmolypi. A co-existence of the sorrow that comes with recognizing fallacies of the past, the redemption of allowing forgiveness and accepting life’s paradoxes and ultimately the joy of maintaining optimism for the future with all its inherent ups and downs, tops and bottoms.

Evita Tsokanta is an art historian based in Athens who works as a writer, educator and an independent exhibition-maker. She lectures on curatorial practices and contemporary Greek art for the Columbia University Athens Curatorial Summer Program and Arcadia University College of Global Studies. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues and journals and completed a Goethe Institute writing residency in Leipzig, Halle 14.

*A line from the film Flowers and Bottoms, written and directed by Christos Massalas