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We Are Stardust

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"Jon gave me back my childhood trust in wonder. And now I want to share this magic with all of you." E.R.

Dimitra Kouzi in conversation with Elisabeth Rasmussen

Dimitra Kouzi (DK): If you had to describe the film in one sentence, what would it be?
Elisabeth Rasmussen (E.R.): A love letter to citizen science and thinking outside the box.

DK: How did you first encounter Jon Larsen’s story?
E.R.: I had just returned to Norway after living abroad for years. I heard a radio interview where a man claimed he found stardust on rooftops, and I needed to meet this guy. When I met him, I knew I wanted to make a film about him.

How did you approach portraying Jon Larsen’s character—both as a musician and as an amateur scientist—so that viewers could connect with his curiosity and perseverance?”
I wanted to portray Jon first and foremost as a human being. A question that came up for me is why Jon? How is it possible that a Norwegian artist does what big scientific institutions have not been able to do? 
His mum sharing stories about him as a little boy who would come home with pockets full of rocks, teaches us something about him. His background as a jazz musician is essential. Jazz is about improvisation and listening deeply. His art studies told him about textures and pattern recognition. Those same skills informed his scientific discovery. 

Photo: Andrew Farrar

Jon approaches research with a creative mindset.

But beyond that, I wanted to show vulnerability. There were years of dismissal. Years of doubt. 

The audience needs to feel the cost of persistence, not just the triumph.

By allowing time for silence, reflection, and small details, the way he handles the material when looking for it, a particle under a microscope, the way he speaks about rocks, we see not just determination, but wonder. I spent nearly a decade filming him, which allowed space for real moments to unfold naturally.
By showing both his doubts and his persistence, the audience can see themselves in him. He is not a superhero. He is someone who refused to stop looking. And that makes him a hero.

The visual scale moves from microscopic particles to cosmic imagery. How did you approach this cinematically?
I have always been fascinated with micro/macro perspectives. A friend showed me Charles and Ray Eames’s ‘Powers of 10’ during a conversation at Cannes film festival in 2007, and I was mesmerised. I later learned that electrons exist in orbitals (clouds) around a dense, central nucleus composed of protons and neutrons like tiny little solar systems in our body. Nature’s and life’s circular connectedness is so beautiful. I wanted to approach this by showing how our solar system was created by stardust, and how micrometeorites were the beginning of life on Earth through bringing water molecules and other materials like carbon from space. As this process happened 4.6 billion years ago, we solved this cinematically by working with VFX. It was very important to us that the scientific correctness remain valid, so we leaned on scientific institutions as well as the scientists in the film to provide images and feedback on our animations. I have taken inspiration from ‘Powers of Ten’ in the sense that we move from a human body and show different steps all the way to the Milky Way and back, and also inside the body, down to the electron swarm – simply to illustrate the connectedness of everything.

Photo Viktoria Kovalenko

Why was it important to frame this story as character-driven rather than as a conventional science documentary?
When you are a documentary filmmaker and meet someone as passionate and fascinating as Jon Larsen, it is next to impossible not to turn a camera on him. I wanted to share with audiences what he represents – freedom, dream, hope. I do like science films; however, I feel that traditional science films might sometimes alienate broader audiences. Jon stands for openness, curiosity and wonder. His method for finding stardust in urban areas is as interesting to me as stardust itself. I did not want to make a film for scientists; I wanted to make a film that makes it possible for everyone to understand what stardust is, and how we can find it.

How did you portray Jon’s determination without romanticising him? What drew you to his underdog struggle against ‘gatekeepers’ of science?

I come from Sápmi, the traditional homelands of the Sámi people that stretch from Norway across Sweden and into Finland and Russia. My people were colonised and told that their language, culture and belief system were wrong. I guess that makes questioning the perceived right and wrong inevitable. My last documentary was about a punk who never gave in to conformity and established rules. See the pattern here? I love the fact that Jon follows his intuition. He is so humble and inclusive. He teaches even children to find stardust. Just letting his personality shine through the camera, and using that same energy in the edit, having open communication with the editors, encouraging them to go with their gut helped the film find balance without romanticising Jon.

How did you balance Indigenous cosmology with scientific rationalism?The beautiful Sámi myth I heard as a child about how a reindeer wandered down a ray of sun and brought life to Earthmakes me feel awe and connectedness with the sun and nature around me. I felt the same magic and awe when I heard that stardust could be found everywhere around us and that it is these tiny micrometeorites that brought life to Earth. The sun is our parent and everything around us is connected. I feel great comfort knowing that, and a deep love for nature.

What were the biggest challenges you faced during production?
One challenge was to understand and stay on top of the science before interviewing Jon and top astrophysicists and geologists. I spent a good while preparing myself.

What surprised you during the making of the film?
I was astonished to find out just how many tonnes of terrestrial material Jon went through to find one extraterrestrial particle. But most of all I was surprised when I saw how beautiful micrometeorites are!

The moment when NASA scientists climb onto their own rooftop to collect micrometeorites feels almost absurd. What did that sequence represent within the larger arc of the story?
It is true that NASA have spent billions on finding extraterrestrial particles in space. In my interview with NASA Stardust Curator Mike Zolensky, he said that on one such mission, they found half a milligram of stardust. Jon had found much more than that. Scientists need to study this material to learn about where life came from before our solar system was created, and whether there is life in other places in our universe. Before Jon, stardust was only found in space, Greenland, Antarctica and deep ocean sediments. By finding stardust on NASA’s rooftop, Jon proved once and for all that it can be found anywhere. This was a game changer both for Jon and for the field of micrometeorite research. Mike Zolensky said that Jon, through his discoveries, has opened a new door to the beginning of our solar system.

World Premiere March 2026 Photo: Katerina Tzigotzidou

The invention of a microscope camera capable of capturing micrometeorites in vivid colour introduces extraordinary imagery. How did you integrate VFX and AI-assisted animation while preserving the documentary’s authenticity and intimacy?
Mineralogist and photographer Jan Braly Kihle is one of the most interesting and knowledgeable people I have ever met. He created the microscope camera used to photograph Jon’s stardust. Together, Jan and Jon continued to improve it. The photographs they take of cosmic dust are breathtaking, and there has been absolutely no AI or VFX manipulation of the still photos of Jon’s stardust. Micrometeorites are simply that beautiful when you see them enlarged.

But, being a filmmaker, I wanted to see a tiny micrometeorite move. I wanted to see it fall from space and land on Jon’sbreakfast table, because that is what set this whole journey into motion. I’ve seen it inside my head since I heard the story and wanted to visualise this beautiful journey that these small cocktails of life-sustaining materials make when they fall down to Earth like snowflakes.
Making the 0.3mm micrometeorite fall from space and land on the table proved challenging to visualise. We worked closely with Colin Byrne at Little Shadow in London. They used a high-resolution photo of an actual micrometeorite from Jon and Jan and cutting-edge VFX and AI-assisted VFX technology to make it both visible and in a realistic size as it moves.

Those photos of the Micrometeorites made possible due to the microscope invention of Mineralogist and photographer Jan Braly Kihle

We Are Stardust suggests that science belongs to everyone. In an era of polarisation and mistrust of expertise, do you see the film as political?
One of the simplest definitions of politics I heard was from the late Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, who said, ‘Politics is to want something.’ In that sense, the film is political, as it wants to give people the power and inspiration to think outside the box. As Jon says, we tend to think that everything is invented; but it is not. Geologically speaking, we are still beginners; there is so much more to come. Everyone can help shape how the future is going to look and what will be discovered. You do not need money or a science degree to do that. You need curiosity and perseverance.

Elisabeth Rasmussen, Mineralogist and photographer Jan Braly Kihle and Jon Larsen

What do you hope audiences will take away from the film?
It is my hope that every viewer of this film will feel the excitement and zest for discovering stardust that Jon’s micrometeorites reawakened in me. The connection I felt to the stars as a little girl was indeed more real than I realised at the time. We are all part of something bigger; we are all connected. If the film can make the audience feel connected to nature and to each other, or be inspired in any way, that would make me very happy.

Producers (left to right) Jamie Hever (UK), Benedikte Bredesen (NO), and Ulrik Gutkin (DN) Thessaloniki Film Festival / Studio Aris Rammos

Looking ahead, what would your ideal future for the film’s journey look like?
The ideal journey would be as many festivals and public-TV platforms as possible, and special screenings where there is a stardust hunt so audiences can learn how to look for stardust themselves. We hope to sign with the right sales agent, one who understands the film and can find audiences in unexpected places. I have been blessed with the most incredible team of producers – Benedikte Bredesen, Jamie Hever and Ulrik Gutkin – as well as the crew and characters in the film. I hope the film opens doors that lead to a place where we all get to continue doing what we love: making stories come alive. We would all love to do screenings for young people, people in prisons, people in hospitals… I want the film to reach as far and wide as a documentary can and for as many people as possible to meet Jon and feel encouraged by his quest. The sky is not the limit!

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cover Photo: Mineralogist and photographer Jan Braly Kihle Elisabeth Rasmussen, and Jon Larsen: Thessaloniki Film Festival / Studio Aris Rammos

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La Pietà

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INTERVIEW with the Directors, Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés (above picture Thessaloniki Film Festival / Studio Aris Rammos)

By Dimitra Kouzi

You describe the glacier as the true protagonist of La Pietà. How do you direct — and produce — a film in which the central character is neither fully human nor fictional, but a living entity fast disappearing?

It’s difficult to stand before the magnificence of a glacier and not feel that it is something far beyond an inert mass of ice. The ice moves; it groans, it speaks — you could almost feel that it sings. It holds physical particles of our history, oxygen our ancestors once breathed, entire universes trapped within its depths. For us, it is something overwhelming, almost mystical.

So for nearly two decades we have been searching, through cinema — our way of expressing ourselves — for a way to convey to the viewer the blend of beauty and pain we felt when we first stood before Vatnajökull over twenty years ago.

The idea was to treat the glacier as a living being: a vast and powerful being that is now dying. A being that moves, that speaks to us and that weeps; a being to love, to care for, and to mourn when we lose it.

The key to conveying that admiration and compassion for the glacier was discovering that there were many others like us, long before us. We learned the story of Flosi Björnsson and his brothers, who lived in isolation on their remote farm, looking after the glacier. Then we encountered the farm, which is still there, like a still life. Then Flosi’s texts and a 16mm film in which they appear exploring the glacier… And later the photographer Ragnar Axelsson and other characters who, like pilgrims — like us — have, for centuries, been drawn to the lament of Vatnajökull.

It is the human gaze that makes us human, and that humanises. So together, we look at the glacier as we would a wounded young person, like a whale stranded on the sand, like something more than a ruined cathedral… and we do so with the intention of awakening the viewer’s empathy, memory, and awareness.

Watch the TRAILER

Pepe Andreu right (director, editor, script-writer and producer) and Rafa Molés left (director, script-writer and producer)

What makes your film different from other films about climate change?

Beauty is the way. Beauty moves us, and it has moved human beings since our beginnings. It stirs us deeply, makes us react, and makes us act.

From the start, we never thought of making a film with climate change as the central focus, but rather a film about beauty and fascination — about something that moves us and that we are letting die. In fact, the film speaks more about human stupidity than about climate change.

We have all the information available about climate change. We have the data, the forecasts; we know the solution, and yet there is nothing to suggest that we will react as we should. Climate change overwhelms us — it seems too big, beyond our control. But beauty, stories, are something we all understand.

That is our small contribution: to make a film — what is within our power — just as our characters did before us. Beauty works on us, and on many others. We wanted to try. La Pietà is our small contribution to a global problem.

Directors
Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés together with their Music Composer Alberto Lucendo at a Radio interview

We live in a moment of both eco-anxiety and paralysis — we are mostly aware of the facts, yet often feel unable to act. In what way do you hope this film could counter that paralysis?

At one point in the film, Oddur Sigurðsson, a prominent retired glaciologist, speaks with Ragnar, a renowned photographer who has dedicated his work to showing the consequences of climate change for Arctic populations. Oddur tells him that we must find other ways to reach people and convey the urgency of this problem. Scientists have been precise, but they struggle — and are fully aware of how complex it is — to communicate these issues to the public. Oddur Sigurðsson places his faith in the idea that where science falls short, the work of artists can help.

This is how we would like the film to function. In this case, art can serve as a bridge between science and the public.

We all find it difficult to act because the meaning of what we are losing has faded; we have grown accustomed to hearing that there is a problem, yet we are unable to grasp its scale. This is where poetry comes in: to reveal, once again, the meaning of the catastrophe.

However, we do not feel there is pessimism in our film, but rather profound reflection, tough realism, and the belief that— throughout the history of art — the beauty of a still life has moved us and reminded us of our most humanistic side.

Flosi Björnsson and his siblings devoted their lives to the glacier long before climate discourse existed. What does their radical life choice reflect back to us today?

The legacy this family leaves us is an example to follow. Small actions within our reach can transform the world. Their example has moved scientists, artists, the current inhabitants of the valley, and us — to make this film.

Their relationship with everything around them, their awareness of being a natural part of the place they inhabited, and the interest they showed in their surroundings — the flowers, the insects — their desire to learn everything.

The siblings lived almost isolated from the world for most of the year, yet they studied glaciers, botany, geology, entomology… as self-taught learners (Flosi learned several languages on his own, with nothing but books and by listening to the radio), driven by love for the place where they lived. That way of understanding life and relating to nature is the legacy they leave us: to withdraw from the global noise, to look closely at what is right before our eyes, with attention, affection, delicacy, and hope.

Sold out world premiere screening

You’ve referred to the film as a kind of ‘ghost story’. How did this spectral dimension influence both the storytelling and the production choices?

There is an unattainable dimension when you stand before the great wall of a glacier — something that goes beyond what our human mind can assimilate. You try to grasp, with all your senses and knowledge, what you see, what youhear, what you feel, but it’s impossible. It is overwhelming. That spectral dimension is powerful; it is there, if you are fortunate enough to stand on a glacier.

That is why we played with the idea of the ghost, understood in a contemporary sense: a familiar presence from the past, a benevolent spirit that encourages or warns us about what is happening. The farmhouse where the Björnsson family lived is not haunted, but it creaks; the wind slips through the cracks; and, in some way, the voices of those who lived there still resonate — voices from the past that howl like advice, like warnings.

All the Björnsson siblings have passed away. The handwritten texts we found by Flosi, with notes about daily life and his explorations, gave us the real words for that ghost. By reading them, we invoked his spirit and brought his voiceback to life — voiced in the film by the great Icelandic actor Ingvar E. Sigurðsson.

That is also why we filmed the empty farmhouse at different moments of the year: to show — and to hear — the passage of time, with characters whose shadows we barely see (we will all be shadows), focusing on small details capable of evoking it — a box of memories, personal objects they once touched, old paintings, 

You had access to personal archives, even a 16mm reel from 1950. What responsibility did you feel when bringing these fragile memories back to life, and how did you balance preservation with reinterpretation?

When our friend and co-producer Ólafur Rögnvaldsson told us the story of the Björnsson family and we visited the farm, we were in shock — but discovering the 16mm footage undoubtedly pushed us to tell this story.

The old film showed us what we already knew from Flosi’s diaries: the family, the work on the farm, their expeditions to the glacier. But those images had enormous power on their own — almost spectral. It was fascinating and left us spellbound. We wanted to manipulate it as little as possible, to preserve it as we found it, without adding voice-over or ambient sound; only minimal music to help bring that past into the present and allow ourselves to be hypnotised by these images.

We do not believe it is a reinterpretation but a tribute; these frames were shot with a purpose similar to what we are filming today, and they are very valuable material for understanding how this family related to nature.

This respect also extends to the many photographs and personal objects we had access to, which play a fundamental role in the narrative — able to evoke a life and a way of acting that we seek to reframe, or to present as still lifes that function as an offering or an altar.

Sound plays a central role in this film. How did you conceive the sonic identity of the glacier, and at what stage did music and sound design become essential to shaping the film’s ‘voice’?

From the very beginning, we wanted to give life to the glacier and show it as a wounded being, infinitely beautiful. Sound design and music were fundamental to achieving that. We worked with Iván Martínez-Rufat (in charge of sound design) to transform the sounds of the glacier into a lament — into the cry of something that still retains life.

The farmhouse, too, takes on a life of its own. Together with Iván Martínez-Rufat and the wonderful Lithuanian foley team, we played with the idea that inside the house, the wood and the wind should sound like a ship adrift — a kind of ghost ship that carries with it all the life that once inhabited it.

To all of this we added Alberto Lucendo’s score, to create the great requiem the film becomes. Alberto embarked on an exciting sound research project, taking as reference the ideas we proposed (the beached whale, the ruined cathedral, the constant voice of the wind conveying a whispered message, or the running water — like blood), searching for instruments and melodies that would evoke those images and help develop the idea of this requiem.

You have spent many years working in Iceland and building close relationships there. How did this involvement impact the film? Did being insiders give you freedom, or did it increase your sense of responsibility?

Iceland is a place that captivated us more than twenty years ago. And we have not been able to stop going back ever since. This is our second film there, but it could easily have been the first.

When we discovered the country, each of us separately, we immediately felt that one day we would create something out of the glaciers.

From that love at first sight, and from the need to know more, our previous film Lobster Soup was born. That film allowed us to get very close to people and to build a special relationship with them. It also made us understand that we too — more than being part of the surroundings — were part of the problem. We arrived as tourists and, generally, behaved like predators. We have learned this from our capitalist way of life, but here we became aware of it and are willing to act. This is our responsibility.

Lobster Soup had an impressive international run, but among all the recognitions we have received, the one we are proudest of is being named adoptive children of the town of Grindavík, where the film takes place. Being welcomed as part of the story and the community has changed us. Iceland is not an exotic or remote place for us, but something closer to home.

You co-direct and co-produce your films. How does this collaboration function in practice? How do you divide and share creative and production responsibilities? How do you navigate divergence of views while maintaining a unified vision?

Sharing the direction of a film comes naturally to us. That is how we met, and almost without thinking about it, that ishow we made our first film — and we have grown into this way of working.

For us, it is an easy way to work, mainly because we start from a shared vision of what drives us to make a film and to tell it in a certain way. We are two minds sharing the same vision, and then we bring in other minds from the team. We talk things through a lot, and the film itself decides — sometimes immediately, and other times over time.

Our roles as directors and writers are constantly intertwined, and while we do divide certain tasks — sometimes one of us focuses more on writing and the other on editing — we are both involved in every decision about the film.

La Pietà embraces a contemplative, slow cinematic language. In a time of accelerated consumption and shrinking attention spans, how do you reflect on the future of cinema, particularly this kind of immersive, patient filmmaking?

Without a doubt, the future of cinema is uncertain. The current crisis goes beyond the industry and economics: we arewitnessing a flattening of narratives under the rule of algorithms and speed-driven consumption — a simplification of film language on a scale we have not seen before. Little by little, we are giving in to a culture of disposability, and the kind of cinema we have understood until now may increasingly survive as a form of cultural resistance rather than simply as a nostalgic trend. Resisting is a beautiful way to create.

What role does humour play in your film?

Director Rafa Molés, and 
Director Pepe Andreu, Thessaloniki Film Festival / Studio Aris Rammos

Humour is one of the most useful tools for expressing or communicating, but also one of the most difficult to articulate. For us it is especially difficult because of our, let’s say, “melancholic” nature, but we would like to have enough talent to use it more.

This film uses humour, but it is closer to satire or sarcasm, with the intention of ridiculing ourselves and the way human beings relate to nature today.

At a certain point, the camera seems to turn towards all of us. The tourists represent each and every one of us — consuming the glacier like insects devouring a corpse, moving through its entrails impassively. The sequence of tourists on the glacier taking selfies is funny, but it is also painful. It holds up a mirror to us: this is who we are; we laugh at ourselves, but it is profoundly bitter.

What do you hope audiences take with them?

We hope that fascination — the love and beauty of glaciers — becomes the spark that helps people wake up and take action.

Directors
Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés have been working together as writers and directors of documentary films since 2013. Their work has been selected at festivals such as San Sebastián, Visions du Réel, DOK.fest Munich, and Thessaloniki.

The film had its world premiere at the 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (2026) were it was awarded The “Human Values” Award of the Hellenic Parliament .

Want to watch it? La Pieta will continue its festival journey:

in Spain, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Lithuania (very soon the details will be announced)

Find more about it in the PRESS KIT

Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés, Ólafur Rögnvaldsson their Icelandic co-producer, and 
Arūnas Matelis their Lithuanian co-producer

Articles, Doc-making, EN, Festivals, Screenings-Events

passage to Europe 

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Published in Greek in the local newspaper “To Galaxidi” March 2021[1]

-------------------------------------------------

Save the date: 27 August 2021 Galaxidi

Film Screening: of passage to Europe by Dimitra Kouzi, WINNER for Best documentary, at the San Francisco Greek Film Festival 2021, Special Jury Award Documentary at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival

Both by luck and design, a privileged choice, dictated by the pandemic, to stay in Galaxidi since late August 2020, offered us the pleasure for an even more unique in-person world premiere for my film, Good Morning Mr Fotis![2]Being in Galaxidi throughout this period gave us another blessed opportunity – to enjoy a swim in the sea almost every single day throughout the winter![3]

Everyone who was there at the October 2020 screening expressed their wish for something more.[4]

A few short hours after the screening, Mit[5] wrote a very helpful, to me, article/review, titled ‘Hosting Refugee Children in Greece’.[6]

The public’s response in Galaxidi, Mit’s review on the morning following the screening, a 5 month tutorial with him and later Tue's Steen Müller’s review, (two months later), prompted me to create a new film, during the lock-down.[7]

passage to Europe was selected to be screened at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival on 10–20 May and at the Greek Film Festival in Berlin on 1–6 June (both events online).[8] The first live in-person screening in Greece will take place at Galaxidi on Saturday 27 August.[9]

Mit's text might very well have been subtitled: ‘A guided tour to the new Athens’. Viewers, including the Greeks who don’t live in the city centre nor pass by Vathi Square, where the film is set, embark on a kind of a ‘journey’ out of their bubble and to this neighbourhood, which has dramatically transformed in the last ten years. The area is now almost exclusively inhabited by immigrants and refugees. This is a common occurrence in many European cities, but in the suburbs;[10] here, it has happened in the very heart of the city. It is the neighborhood that is the context in which the story takes place, that creates the conditions, that made me think and make a film. My own setting, my environment, is what determines the conditions of my life; it gave me the opportunity to think about making a film; yet my broader environment in Greece was definitely not what helped me turn my vision into reality – or will help me to make my next film. 

The issue of a lack of a conducive framework often arises in our discussions. We are lucky here in Galaxidi to have a reference to a very specific and easy to grasp framework once in place in the village – a framework developed by seamen, which was the differentiating factor for Galaxidi. What would these seamen say after the second screening, in August 2021, sipping their coffee in the three cafes (Krikos/Hatzigiannis/Kambyssos) on the Galaxidi port? 

A picture containing road, outdoor, street, person Description automatically generated

Mit argues that in the 70 minutes of the original film there was not a strong enough link to the refugee issue,[11]especially for Northern European viewers who are not immediately aware of the connection, but will certainly face the issue eventually, as it is in Northern Europe that almost all the children in Good Morning Mr Fotis dream of living in ten years’ time.[12]

So my goal was to condense the action and highlight the immigration issue. Mit proposed me to give the film an open ending which I did without any further filming taking place. Mr Fotis should not be alone in carrying the load, when every year he welcomes a new class of children of multiple nationalities, often with non-existent Greek, making us complacent and creating the illusion that, as long as there are teachers like Mr Fotis, everything is fine. For the different end I used black and white pictures by Dimitris Michalakis.

Shorter durations are more ‘portable’. They afford much more freedom. It’s like travelling light.[13] Evaluation – what goes out, what goes in – is hard and puts you to the test, as it requires exacting standards and constant decisions. In passage to Europe, as the new film is called, the beginning changes, the end changes, and the duration decreases (from 70ʹ to 48ʹ). 

In fact, all children wish to leave for countries that do not have their own ‘Lesbos islands’, writes Mit (10/26/2020). This adds moral value to Greece’s efforts, he adds. He supposes that pupils may well take for granted what Fotis does (he agrees on this with Tue Steen Müller from Denmark and his review of the film);[14] viewers do, too, I add. At the same time, we all wonder, ‘Why aren’t there more people like Fotis?’ 

passage to Europe deals with the issue of immigration in the light of social integration, with respect for diversity, not in theory but in practice. 

Fotis Psycharis has been a teacher at a public school in the heart of Athens for 30 years. The majority of his students, as in the wider region, are children of immigrants and refugees from Africa, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asia, who often see Greece as an inevitable stopover to other countries of Europe. Cultural differences, the lack of a common language, the overcoming of these challenges, Ramadan, Bollywood, the unexpected things that occur during rehearsals for the performance they are preparing to mark their graduation from primary school, the children’s dreams and insecurity for the future, all make up a unique everyday reality in this class, which consists of 17 students from 7 different countries. Aimed at an adult audience, the film provides a rare opportunity to experience life in a public school in today's Greece, which is a host country for immigrants and refugees.

It is an observational documentary. Both Mit and Tue agree on that. I observe a reality that makes me think. What does it mean to grow up in two cultures, in a country other than where you were born? What can we learn from similar cases in history? To create the present, Mit says, one must go back to the past, and from there to the future. To create the future it takes creativity in the present, rather than taking comfort in the past, I believe.  What does that mean for a place such as Galaxidi, a formerly vibrant shipbuilding, ship-owning, and seafaring town? 

In early 2017, when I started making my film Good Morning Mr Fotis, I was planning for it to be 20 minutes long, reasoning that ‘smaller’ meant ‘safer’. I sought to obtain a filming permit from the Greek Ministry of Education to film in the school.[15] However, I went on to shoot a lot of more good material. So much so that it is enough for a third film, if only funding is secured.[16]

During making passage to Europe, things happened that can only happen when you actually do something. Now I think, combine, see differently, take more risks. I have my gaze fixed on this issue, which seems to have fallen out of the news[17] but is bound to return with a vengeance, aggravated by the pandemic. In mid-March 2021, Turkey-Germany negotiations resumed,[18] with the former demanding compensation in order to continue to ‘keep’ refugees outside of the EU.[19]

I feel grateful for making this journey in space and time together with Fotis and for capturing this moment on film twice.  It's a diary, a proposal to look at a story that concerns us all in Europe. In the film, one school year ends and the next one begins. Yet, it doesn’t come full circle and end with the end credits. My intention was for it to be an open circle, a relay, encouraging viewer interpretations, continuities, thought and action.

Dimitra Kouzi
Galaxidi, March 2021

[1] Translated into English by Dimitris Saltabassis

[2] I would like to thank all viewers who showed up at the Youth House on 25/10/2020 to watch my film, Good Morning Mr Fotis, an audience of some 35 indomitable persons who braved the fact that the screening was ‘al fresco’ in the courtyard in the evening, with social distancing and masks, in a freezing maistros (mistral, the north-westerly wind). Not only that, but they stayed on after the screening for a lively Q & A! For me, this was a magical moment, and I would like to thank everyone who was part of our audience – an indispensable element to a creator! Even more so during a time such as this, when everything takes place online! I was fortunate to show my film to people most of whom have known me since I was a child, and my parents and grandparents, too.

[3] ‘Sure, the sea is cold,’ is the standard reply – and that’s precisely what makes a brief winter swim (5–15’) so beneficial! Let alone how great you feel after you pass this test! 

[4] Good Morning Mr Fotis, documentary, 70', Greece, 2020, written, directed, and produced by Dimitra Kouzi • goodmorningmrfotis.com, Good Morning Mr Fotis: Greek Film Centre Docs in Progress Award 2019 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Festival • Youth Jury Award 2020, 22nd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival • Selected to be nominated for IRIS Hellenic Film Academy Award 2021 for Βest Documentary. 

[5] Mit Mitropoulos, Researcher, Environmental Artist, Akti Oianthis 125, 332 00  Galaxidi, Municipality of Delphi [email protected].

[6] ‘Hosting Refugee Children in Greece’, To Galaxidi newspaper, November 2020.

[7] This ‘discussion’, which could only take place thanks to the fact that both I and Mit were constantly in Galaxidi due to the pandemic, was the main reason why I decided to make passage to Europe.

[8]  Earlier on, the film was screened at the San Francisco Greek Film Festival on 16–24 April 2021.

[9] passage to Europe, documentary film, 48ʹ, Greece, 2021. Written, Directed, and Produced by Dimitra Kouzi ([email protected], at the moment Parodos 73, 33 200  Galaxidi, Municipality of Delphi).

[10] Jenny Erpenbeck (author), Susan Bernofsky (translator), Go, Went, Gone, Portobello Books, London 2017. Set in Berlin, where immigrants and refugees have also been received, the book is based on a large number of interviews with immigrants and their stories. The main character is a solitary retired university professor, recently widowed and childless. One day he suddenly ‘discovers’ the existence of refugees in his city; through the fellowship that develops and the help he gives them, he finds new meaning in his life, which seemed to be over when he retired.

[11] The refugee/immigrant issue will historically always be topical – all the more so now that the revision of the EU policy is pending, which was transferred to the Portuguese Presidency that took over from the German one on 1/1/2021.  It is one of the most hotly contested issues facing Europe at a time when there are member states that call for ‘sealing off’ Europe to refugees and immigrants and only accepting people of specific ethnicities, cultures, and religions, according to Santos Silva, Portugal’s foreign minister (Financial Times, 2/1/2021, p.2).

[12] What’s striking to me is that refugee children wish to leave Greece for the very same reasons that Greek young people do: due to the lack of a framework.

[13] Like sailors, who never have a lot of stuff in their cabins. 

[14] filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4887, 25/1/2021

[15] The film Good Morning Mr Fotis was not funded by the Ministry of Education. I addressed a registered letter to the Minister, Niki Kerameos, on 4/2/2021, to inform her about the film and to suggest that Fotis Psycharis be honoured for his overall contribution as a teacher. I have not received a response nor has Fotis received any acknowledgement of his work – at a time when the need for teacher evaluation is increasingly felt.

[16]  See article footnote 5.

[17] In early March 2020, some 7,000 persons live in Kara Tepe, the camp that replaced Moria. More than 2,120 are children; 697 are four years and younger. ‘The Desperate Children of Moria’, Der Spiegel (in English), 1/4/2021, https://www.spiegel.de/international.

[18] At the time of writing (March 2021), Greece makes efforts to send back to Turkey 1,450 asylum-seekers whose application has been rejected. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 12.4 million Syrians live in famine and pressure Turkey in the form of an influx of migrants (currently holding, according to official UN figures, 3.6 million from Syria and another 300,000 from elsewhere). See Handelsblatt, 14/3/2021, ‘Deutschland und die Türkei verhandeln neuen Flüchtlingspakt – Griechenland verärgert, Die Türkei hält Geflüchtete von der Weiterreise in die EU ab. Das soll sie für Geld und Zugeständnisse weiter tun. Das birgt diplomatische Probleme.’  [Germany and Turkey negotiate new immigration agreement – Greece is annoyed, Turkey restrains migratory flows from continuing their journey to the EU. To continue doing so, it is asking for money and benefits. This creates diplomatic problems.]

[19] Handelsblatt: ‘New refugee deal negotiated by Germany and Turkey – “Greece upset”. According to information cited by Handelsblatt, the points that are most likely to spoil a new agreement are being discussed.’ To Vima newspaper, 14/03/2021

EN, Festivals, KinderDocs, Screenings-Events

How to Reach a Young Audience

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Kinderdocs second edition (2017–18) is here!

KinderDocs is a documentary festival of award-winning films made for or addressed to children and teenagers, as well as their teachers, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and their friends!  KinderDocs provides a platform for discovering the magic of documentaries and exploring new ways of cross-generation communication, inspired by stories we all care about, and for having fun. Each film is a story on teenage life, friendship, family, relationships, education, creativity, art, music, dance, psychology, migration, environment.

Each film is an opportunity for constructive dialogue and after-screening events, building tomorrow’s thinking viewers today. Pioneering new locations for docs and young audiences, KinderDocs is held in the two largest contemporary art museums in Greece,  in collaboration with the museums' education departments: the Benaki Museum (Athens) and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki). The documentary film is a contemporary art form, which speaks to the hearts and minds of young people of all ages!

KinderDocs programme for schools takes place on weekdays at 10:00. Educators click here for more information. Screenings for the whole family and friends take place on weekends at 12:00. More info here.

The festival is a regular meeting opportunity, held once a month both in Athens and Thessaloniki starting in October 2017 through to April 2018.  Produced by Kouzi Productions, it is supported by the biggest documentary festival in Europe – idfa (The Netherlands) and the oldest documentary festival for kids doxs! (Germany).

Check out KinderDocs 2017–18 programme.

Dimitra Kouzi
KinderDocs Artistic Director & Producer

EN, Festivals, Interviews, People, Press Kit, Screenings-Events

From Siberia with love

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Olga Delane, Interview to Dimitra Kouzi About her documentary Siberian LOVE official idfa selection 2016

What does a woman need to be happy and fulfilled? After 20 years of living in Berlin, the film director Olga goes back to her roots in a small Siberian village, where she is confronted with traditional views of relationships, life and love.

Dimitra Kouzi: Olga, where are you from?
Olga Delane: People consider me a Russian in Germany and a German in Russia. My great great grandmother’s name was Wilhelmine; she moved from Germany to Russia 200 years ago. The fact is that I am a German-Russian who moved back to Germany 20 years ago. I grew up under the Soviet culture, so I am a ‘Soviet’, too, even though the USSR is no longer. I was lucky to move to Germany with my parents when I was only 16 years old. Ultimately, I can feel at home everywhere. This is a great privilege.

What is your film about?
On the one hand, it is an opportunity for viewers to discover a place such as Siberia, which for most people is a remote, extreme and exotic place. How do people live in Siberia? You can experience that in the film. Viewers can feel very close to the people who live there. Get to know them. On the other hand, this is a film about relationships – human relationships between men and women, family relationships. This is the basic storyline for the film. I live in a country (Germany) in which there are many opportunities in all aspects of life. As a free person, I am tempted to try them all, to experience, to evolve. On the other hand, the pace of life prevents us from experiencing all that we want, and to evolve as human beings, to taste this life and learn from our choices. In this incredible and inexhaustible freedom, there is less and less room for family, relationships, children. We are a generation that cannot develop relationships.

How did you find the village?
A few years ago, in 2009, my father took me to the village and introduced me to relatives and friends. It is a Cossack village; once there lived 700 families, now there are only 50, mainly working on land and animal-farming. It’s a small scale. Here, people can dream that they will win one million, but they cannot ‘conceive’ a sum of one billion. When I first visited, word got around that I was an American journalist. If you carry a camera, you are a journalist for them.

Would you ‘survive’ in that village?
I haven’t tried. I know I need to be in constant motion: do projects, have plans; I have to do something all the time. I guess I would be very anxious, sooner or later, or even aggressive. I have the feeling that people there do not develop. Everything stays the same. Undoubtedly, when you arrive at a place like that, a village where time has stopped, devoid of big-city ‘temptations’, there is no pressure to have a ‘career; there is no advertising, no internet – there is no telephone line sometimes. You are then forced to deal with the inhabitants of this place, and with your own, Western lifestyle.

olga-schonWhat about the women?
The basis of a woman’s life in the village is caring, working and children. She is safe. We in our world are far away from that. We have much higher expectations, but in the meantime we lost track in dealing with this freedom.

What was your biggest challenge (technically and/or emotionally)?My first shock was when one of my leading characters refused to be in the film. A German woman who got married to a Siberian hunter. I had to travel two days by train and two days by boat to reach her. I lived in her village (population 57) for two weeks because there was no boat for me to leave. On the other hand, this enabled me to work very well. One month after filming, she decided she did not wish to participate in the film and prohibited me from using the material.
What was even harder was when, one night before leaving for Siberia, something happened to our cameraman and he had to cancel his trip. We only had 10 hours to find a replacement. It could not be someone from Germany, as we would have to get them a visa, and we could not afford new extra-expensive tickets to Siberia. A thriller. In the end, we found a solution. We found a young talented and motivated cameraman in Siberia who, in addition, had his own equipment. There were emotional difficulties, too. When one of my leading characters died.

Did this experience change you?
Yes, for me my protagonists are a symbol of endurance and strength. Despite their hard life they manage not to complain, but go through life as it comes. When I have problems, I immediately think of them and calm down. And what was for me only a suspicion before filming, that we need to keep our egos outside of a relationship, was confirmed. Yet, this is a huge process of working with ourselves.

Take us into your editing room. What decisions did you have to make while editing the film?
First of all, to decide to start editing! I have not been to film school. And I had only one prior experience. But for that previous film there were no financiers who had requirements. We just did what we liked. For Siberian Love, everybody had expectations already about where the story should go. And we had tons of material after four years of shooting. We had filmed using three different cameras in different qualities, and we had six families as protagonists. My editor, Phillip Gromov, with his passion, helped me a lot to manage all this enormous work. It is not important what you prefer, but how you will make a good film.

Click to Watch the trailer 

 

EN, Festivals, Interviews, People, Screenings-Events

About “becoming” and failure, Interview Sara Broos, Part 3

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Who do you want to be?
I’m often surprised when I find out things about myself I didn’t know. I don’t think we have one true self but many different faces. Rilke writes about that in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: how we consist of so many different layers and faces. We walk around with them and put them on ­– sometimes one face gets worn out, or becomes thin like paper.

I have spent so many years of my life trying to be someone else and looking for something else, with a restlessness that in some ways is positive, because it’s about being curious, longing to explore, to move on. But there is also another side to it, when you’re always on the run, feeling independent and free, without anything keeping you. Loneliness can be brutal sometimes. I don’t have the same restlessness anymore. My mother talks about that in the film, that she no longer yearns for somewhere else, not in the same way as before, when she always carried a diffuse longing for elsewhere.

I appreciate to be in one place for a longer time; at the same time, I have a nomadic mind so I can get up and leave any minute. And I still love that feeling of being on the road, on my way, playing good music, watching the landscape changing, being in transit. Or just waiting for the plane at the airport, or arriving to a new place where I’ve never been before and don’t know what to expect.
I now spend more time in the countryside in Sweden, where I have an old house. I also live part-time in Berlin. These two places are very good for me because I feel so much at home and alive. There is no pretence. It just is what it is, natural, beautiful and raw. There’s a title of a book by Robert Frank: ‘Hold Still – Keep Going’. I very much believe in that. To not rush, but to be present. I think that’s the most important thing for a filmmaker or an artist. I work in a very intuitive way. I always have my camera with me.

Failure: How do you feel about it?
When I grew up, I felt like my whole life was a failure compared to others. My parents were artists, our home was chaotic and unconventional. We lived in the countryside in Sweden, our neighbours were farmers. My friends’ parents had normal jobs. I was ashamed and wanted to be like everybody else. In the film, there is a passage with a little girl with a cute dress, Sophia. We were best friends. I adored her. She was so pretty, their home picture-perfect. I felt like a failure compared to her. But underneath the surface things weren’t that perfect. And she dreamt of my life.

Now when I look back I am happy that it was not all perfect and that I have the experience of what it means not to fit in. I had to find my own way. Feeling that I was not in the right place made me curious to explore other worlds. I started travelling at an early age and went alone on trains in Eastern Europe for the first time when I was 15. I was very shy and had an old Hi 8 camera that I used to film everything I saw, people I met – a way to communicate and get in touch with people. I was so full of questions about love, the feeling of home, and I ended up filming very personal conversations with people I met on trains and in places in Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, all around Europe. I am now using that archive material for my new film, Notes On A Journey. Feeling different or feeling like a failure can also be a driving force for you to search for others who share your experience. I felt much more at home in Bosnia than I did in my own small village in the countryside.

There was a period in my teens when I revolted against the chaos that was around me, growing up in an artist family and a messy home, and with parents who were different. Everything had to be perfect. I loved writing, but suddenly it was related to prestige. I wrote chronicles for a daily newspaper, a full-page article every Saturday. I won many prestigious literary prizes. I was the youngest ever to receive a journalist prize at the age of 18. I was offered a book contract. I did everything right. I was successful from the outside. Yet, inside I was torn apart and very unhappy. It was all just a shell. The more successful I became the more distant from myself. Finally, I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, and all the passion was gone. When you are afraid of failure, you stick to the well-known, which I believe is the greatest threat to creativity.

I don’t care so much anymore about being loved by everyone; I am interested in the notion of failure, what that means. Also, the complementary idea: success, what that means. Of course, I want to always do the best I can, and I want people to like what I do. But who decides what is a failure? To write one great script, maybe you have to write ten bad ones before you get there. When I showed the first versions of my film to my mentor, Stefan Jarl, it was ‘a failure’ and I knew it, but it was part of the process. I believe that we need to defuse the fear of failure.

What do you want people to think and feel as they are leaving the theatre?
After a screening at Gothenburg Film Festival, a woman came up to me and hugged me, saying, ‘Thank you for making this film! The first thing I will do when I go home is call my daughter. We never really talk.’

The end (or just the beginning?)

Meet us in Krakow! In competition at Krakow Film Festival

1 June 19.30 Malopolski Ogród Sztuki  (MOS 1)

3 June 14.30 Malopolski Ogród Sztuki  (MOS 1)

Reflections

a feature-length documentary by Sara Broos

80 min./Documentary/Sweden/2016

Also available in the online library

Website & Trailer

broosfilm.com

EN, Festivals, Interviews, People, Screenings-Events

Women’s Gaze: Director Sara Broos, on looking in the Mirror

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What do you see when you look in the mirror?
Sometimes when I look at myself I almost get a surreal feeling, as if it’s somebody else, but still someone I recognize. Isn’t it strange that your eyes can see everything except themselves? I don’t judge myself as much anymore in the way I did when I was younger. I could be very hard on myself and never think that I was good enough, or see any beauty in myself. I think the eyes reveal so much, not only what they look like but also what they see and where they look. I remember when I was a child observing my mother before the mirror, how I could feel her judgement over herself.

Sara_Karin_Profile

How do you feel about getting older?
I feel OK with getting older, only there is still so much I want to do and the older I become the more aware I am that time is limited. It’s so easy to long for youth, yet I wouldn’t like to be 20 again. I think what’s most important is not to turn bitter, to grow old with dignity and to accept the changes. I read about a woman who was afraid of getting wrinkles so she decided never to smile. But the lines in your face reveal what kind of life you lived. There is nothing more beautiful than a face that is full of life, and I believe that the strive for perfectionism, or for being beautiful will only have the opposite effect.
My mother says in the film that she was afraid of aging, that she thought that after 40 life was over. She was, and still is, beautiful but when she was young her beauty was also something she could hide behind. She lived in a myth, took different names for each new man she met. When she met my father and they got married she had to reveal her real name. She had called herself Melinda, from a song by Bob Dylan. Some people become younger the older the get, in their minds. My Dutch grandmother, Bep, with her thick, curly white hair, was much more strict and conservative when she was young. When she was over 90, she made her debut as an actress in a Chekhov play. She was playful and curious, and became freer and freer in her mind the older she got. More and more beautiful, too, I believe. I feel in many ways all the more connected with the child within me the older I get. And then it’s easy to say that age is just a number. It is, yet it’s also a hard fact. I remember when I listened to Agnes Varda giving a lecture in Gothenburg, how fascinated I was just looking at her face and how it was shifting from a little girl to a young woman, and to an old woman.

Do you believe in love?
Love is probably the only thing I really believe in. Without love, without interaction with others, we are nobody. We reflect ourselves in the other, and when I see beauty in someone, hopefully that person will feel beautiful. There is a line in a song by Blonde Redhead: ‘If you start doubting me then I start to doubt myself’. We are so dependent on each other we come to live through each other. I think we affect each other very much, and small actions can have a profound influence. Just the way we see each other. The energy we spread around us. A smile from a stranger in the crowd. That is also love. Love exists in so many different forms. We all want to be loved for who we are. That is something we share. Probably that’s why love is a never-ending theme in so many films and songs.

In my film For You Naked two people fall in love without speaking each other’s language. They have to find other ways to get to know each other. I think it’s interesting because it’s easy to tell the same story about yourself. How do you present yourself to the other when you want to put yourself in a good light? Language can also be a protection where you just repeat the same story over and over again.

Freedom seems to play a key role in your life. When do you feel free?
My mother says in the film: ‘If freedom is not feeling ashamed of yourself, then I am far from being free.’ I really think that freedom and shame are related. If you feel ashamed of yourself, of your body, of who you are, then you are not really free.

I feel free when I am surrounded by good energy in people and places. Places where there is air to breathe and things are not totally defined or formed. I am very sensitive to atmospheres and sounds. Freedom doesn’t mean leaving everything behind and taking off, but being in tune with yourself and the choices you make. At the same time, there is so much that we can never control, and in that sense we are not really free. I recently watched a great documentary, A Hard Loving Woman, at Tribeca Film Festival, which screened in the same programme as my short film Homeland. It is about Juliette Lewis and how she left Hollywood and started a rock band. She talks about beauty and how she never could adapt to the beauty ideal. When she goes on stage, she wants to be without makeup and just full of raw energy. It’s very empowering to see a woman who just doesn’t care at all, who doesn’t need to please others. I think that is the opposite of feeling shame. A little child doesn’t feel shame. There is a scene in the film where my sister’s daughter, Alma, aged four, sits in front of the mirror and puts on lipstick. She is playing; it’s a game. But it is also scary, how a four-year-old girl already knows women’s ‘codes’, the way she paints her nails, the way she moves. She knows exactly how to do it, imitating what she’s seen.

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EN, Festivals, Interviews, People, Screenings-Events

Interview with the director Sara Broos, Reflections

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‘I am interested in the cracks, the things in between, the gap, or the abyss. I am always curious about the human mind. Something I believe all my work has in common is the personal approach. I have to be moved by something deeply.’

Sara Broos

Did you really get closer to your mother by making Reflections?

I think we can never really understand each other, or ourselves, fully, but all we can do is try. And I think it’s an act of love to say: ‘I want to spend time with you and get to know you better.’ And we are sometimes so busy with other things and postpone what is the most important: our loved ones. It’s easy to take each other for granted, or to see your parents as just your parents and forget that they are so much more. When my grandparents died I regretted that I didn’t spend more time with them, that I didn’t ask more questions.
My mentor and friend Stefan Jarl used to tell me: ‘Never eat the heart’. It sounds quite brutal, but with that he means that you should keep some things sacred. There are some rooms you should never enter, secrets that are not supposed to be revealed.
It takes a lot of effort to really get to know someone, because we are constantly changing and the mind is so complex and full of contradictions. As soon you think you have defined something, it has already transformed into something else. In the film there is a line: ‘I try to hold on to something, but everything is in constant change.’ I’m in the forest, looking up at a tree. The tree has been there for maybe 100 years, like a witness to everything around. I used to think that trees have eyes, that they see us.
People are different, some people talk a lot without really saying anything. Some people say a lot without using that many words. My grandfather never told my father that he loved him. Not because he didn’t love him, but he didn’t know how to say that simple sentence. When he was close to his death, he hugged my father and said to him: ‘You know, my son, I know you know.’ He had tears in his eyes. He was not a man of many words, but the love he felt was strong. My mother never really talked that much about herself, or about her sorrows and experiences. I also became like that; I kept things inside, focused more on others, and became a good listener. I am interested in this gap, how you can feel so close and have a symbiotic relationship, like I have with my mother, and at the same time feel a big distance. She knows me so well, and she can sense immediately when something is wrong, or when I feel sad, in a way that no-one else can. I think this has to do with the fact that we have very similar experiences from really dark times and self-destructive behaviour.

SB_Reflections_700x1000_Festival logos_Krakow-page-001 kopia

How did you approach such a personal family story and emotionally cope with exposing yourself so much?

It’s about having access to the emotions and then being able to step outside, to see yourself from a distance. When you make a self-portrait, or an autobiographical film, you are both the subject and the object at the same time. I can choose what I want to reveal, and the greatest challenge is to dare to be completely honest and truthful. That is painful because it is so much easier to just portray yourself in a positive way. But then you would only stay on the surface of things.

Fear is my driving force.

Fear means challenge and change. You know that you will be transformed. When I’m thinking of an idea and my heart beats hard I know I’m on the right track and should just follow that feeling. In making this film I wanted to find out what happens when you decide to take a relationship one level deeper, with someone that is already very close to you. There are no major conflicts between me and my mother. I don’t accuse her of anything. But we have such different ways of seeing things depending on our experience. We remember things differently.
Sometimes a scent or an incident can trigger a memory and completely change the mindset. We live with so many different layers and parallel worlds in our minds – reality, illusions, dreams, all existing at the same time. A friend of mine lost his brother on a sunny day in the month of May. When the sun shines in the spring he is longing for the rain.
My mother found a dead foul in the grass one morning, killed by the electric fence. She completely lost her mind. It reminded her of something that had happened 20 years earlier that she had never really talked about, when she lost a child that was strangled by the umbilical cord.

I believe everything you never deal with, or try to keep hidden deep inside, will come back to you.

Sara_Karin_Profile_Field

In what way(s) did you change after completing Reflections?
It is a very important film to me and probably the most personal film I will ever make. Making this film just makes me believe even more in the personal, that the more courage you have and the deeper you dare to go the greater chance that you will make something that others can relate to. Because we are so much the same deep inside; we share the same longing to be loved for who we are. Making this film has given me more courage to believe in my own vision and my ideas and to experiment more. To not make compromises, to listen to others, but also to trust in my intuition.

In competition at Krakow Film Festival

1 June 19.30 Malopolski Ogród Sztuki  (MOS 1)

3 June 14.30 Malopolski Ogród Sztuki  (MOS 1)

Also available in the online library

Official Website & Trailer: Broosfilm.com

Read more here… (soon)

CineDoc, Doc-making, EN, Festivals, Interviews, Screenings-Events

Interview with Marianna Economou (The Longest Run)

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The Greek feature-length documentary The Longest Run [Ο πιο μακρύς δρόμος] by Marianna Economou, on two underage irregular migrants detained as smugglers of irregular migrants in the prison of Volos, premieres in Greece at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Images of the World on Wednesday 16 March at 20.30 at the Olympion Theatre and on 18 March 2016 at 13.30 at the Stavros Tornes Theatre, Warehouse 1, Port. Dimitra Kouzi spoke with the documentary’s director, Marianna Economou.

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Director Marianna Economou

The film began about two years ago, when Marianna came across the book At school I forget the prison by Prof. Kostas Magos, which features accounts by underage migrant prisoners from the storytelling workshop run by Prof. Kostas Magos at the Volos prison. “This book shocked me,” says Marianna Economou. “At the same time, it filled me with questions. How can it be possible for these kids, who are struggling to flee from their predicament in their countries of origin, to find themselves in prison, to be tried by a foreign court in a language they do not understand, and many of them to end up serving extremely long sentences of up to 25 years?”

The professor was the first person she met at the prison. “If you manage to get a filming permit, I’m in for the documentary,” this extraordinary teacher told her. Next stop was the prison director’s office. Marianna needed his permission, as well as permission from the Ministry of Justice, before she could film inside the prison. The Director was positive from the outset, since the film would publicise juvenile prisoners’ training. It took six long months to get the coveted filming permit from the Ministry – an authorisation that had never before or since been given, and this was only made possible by circumstances and people. There was “an extraordinary woman at the Ministry, Eftychia Katsigaraki, says the director, who had been involved with the issue of children’s victimization by irregular migrant traffickers; another contributing factor was that prisons were packed full of child migrants and refugees. The issue had begun to attract European attention; it had been brought up in Brussels.”

YET, HOW DO THESE CHILDREN GET IMPLICATED AND END UP IN PRISON?

“The borders have become harder to cross, especially in Evros because of the fence. Traffickers are organised in a pyramid: the head trafficker at the top and the local ones below. The last smuggler, the one to bring them into Greece, does not want to risk further. He is well aware that if he is caught, he faces prison for life. So what does he do? He brings the people to the border, finds an easy victim – a child or a minor – and blackmails them in different ways. He will say, ‘If you don’t get them across and come back to get the rest of them, we will go to your village and kill your mother.’ Or, ‘Do you see that woman and her child? I will drown them if you don’t go.’ That’s the kind of blackmailing techniques that they use. And of course the other thing they often use is to say, ‘If you take people across, you will not have to pay for your own passage.’ And so they convince these minors, who are in effect caught doing this job and are arrested by the Greek authorities. The Greek law is very strict: for each person trafficked, you get 10 years in prison.”

“I started filming during classes. That’s when I started to identify the most interesting stories and the children that were able to bear the weight of this film.” Jasim was the youngest; he was 17. He was totally lost and scared, unable to grasp what had happened and how he had found himself spending four months in prison waiting for trial. “He was just an inexperienced child,” remembers Marianna Economou. “He came from a small village in northern Iraq and found himself in Greece, a country that he did not even know existed; he thought he was going straight to Germany to his brother. Alsaleh from Syria had already been in prison for 14 months waiting for trial. He spoke Greek well, so he helped Jasim with the language. They also shared the same cell and became friends during their months in prison.”

VOICES ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, FROM ANOTHER WORLD

The film begins with children waiting in line to phone their parents. For Marianna Economou, this was the most shocking of all the scenes in prison. “I saw how anxiously they waited for their turn to phone and struggle to get through to Iraq or Syria. In the beginning, I did not understand a word; I only watched their eyes and expressions, and when I asked, they replied, ‘Our parents are in terrible condition. They are worse off than we are. They are in a war.’ It was the time when Kobani was being bombed, while Isis was beheading the Yazidis in northern Iraq, the ethnic group from which Jasim comes. His whole family had to flee into the mountains. I decided that these phone calls were decisive when I heard their parents’ voices on the other end of the line, from another world, speaking with such intensity, such despair, telling them about the war and at the same time asking them, ‘ Are you all right, my child? I love you! I cannot live when you are so far away from me. Take care of yourself!’ It was always a mother talking to her child. These kids have left a family behind; they are not just ‘irregular migrants’; they all had a mom and a dad who cared for them, who loved them. They could be our own children.”

The film achieved something unprecedented: it received a filming permit for the trial of one of the two characters before the court of Komotini, in northern Greece. “The legal and judicial framework for these minors in the courts of Greece is a huge issue. Very few children have legal representation. The court appoints a lawyer five minutes before the trial begins. Good interpreters are scarce,” says the director. “I felt that there is a serious human-rights issue. Social workers are doing their best to support these kids at prison, but it all stops there.”

The film began, like most films in Greece, with two funding applications: one to the state broadcaster, ERT, and one to the Greek Film Centre (EKK). Shortly after, ERT was closed down. When filming was completed, all you could do was to get in touch with foreign channels, funds, etc. As always, however, they came up against the question: “What funding have you already received from your own country, Greece?” Then came the first prize at Docs in Progress at the Thessaloniki Festival and participation in the co-production meetings of Dok Leipzig Festival, where the prevailing response was: “Go ahead; keep us informed, and we will see.” What tipped the scale was the fact that the refugee emergency had broken out and the issue was already in the news. Thus, the film had to come out and the story of these children ought to be heard. They went into editing, using their own funds, in order to submit the film to Leipzig. The film was indeed accepted by DOK Leipzig and premiered on 27 October 2015 in the International Competition for Long Documentary and Animated Film. It won two awards – the PRIZE OF THE UNITED SERVICES TRADE UNION VER.DI and the INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION LONG HONORARY MENTION.

The Longest Run has officially participated in the festivals:

DOCPOINT (Finland), TEMPO (Sweden), CROSSING EUROPE (Switzerland), ONE WORLD Prague (Czech Republic), and DOCSBARCELONA (Spain).

The film premieres in Greece at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2016, on 16 March 2016 at 20.30 at the Olympion Theatre and on 18 March 2016 at 13.30 at the Stavros Tornes Theatre, Warehouse 1, Port.

In Athens, the film will be screened by CineDoc on Friday 22 April at 20.30 at the French Institute (Institut français de Grèce à Athènes, Sina 31, Athens) and on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 April at Danaos Cinema.

“Leipzig was a revelation after all, adds Marianna Economou: It was a great vindication for us and, thanks mainly to the help of Sabine Lange and Madeleine Avramoussis, the film was acquired by ARTE and aired on 2 February 2016. Eventually, the Greek Film Centre also approved the proposal. This is not the way to do things, though. I hope this film opens up a path abroad for me. Yet, if the possibility for co-productions and international productions with ERT is not re-established, I don’ t know how things will be for documentaries in Greece.”

Film Synopsis

In the Volos prison for minors, Alsaleh from Syria and Jasim from Iraq are awaiting trial, facing heavy charges for irregular migrant trafficking. From inside the prison, they talk on the phone with their parents, who live under the terror of war and ISIS raids while struggling to save themselves. The Longest Run closely follows the story of the two friends in prison and in court, revealing how innocent underage refugees often fall victims of coercion by traffickers and serve heavy sentences in Greek prisons while traffickers continue to operate undisturbed. Alsaleh and Jasim know that if they are convicted, they face imprisonment for up to 25 years.

Trailer on Vimeo

Official Web Site

The Longest Run on Facebook

Interview translated into English by Dimitris Saltabassis

CineDoc, EN, Festivals, Screenings-Events

Stuck in Athens: STOP-OVER

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The Talent Dove of the Sparkasse Leipzig Media Foundation, the top prize in the Young Cinema Competition, went to Kaveh Bakhtiari for the Swiss-French production L’Escale (Stop-Over). The prize money of €10,000 is intended to serve as seed funding for the Iranian-born director’s next documentary project. You can immediately feel the Iranian realism, and that is strange because this time it's a documentary.

Kaveh Bakhtiari

When I saw the documentary at DOK Leipzig I had the feeling that I discovered something very special. A film set in Athens, showing what is going on with irregular immigrants. It gives a human face to what we normally regard as mere statistics.

Kaveh Bakhtiari spends a year in a flat shared by irregular immigrants in Athens. Along with him are his cousin and others who are stuck in Athens, hoping to find a way to move on to Germany, Norway, or any other European country where they can find a job and survive. The filmmaker follows them in Athens and the result is a poignant, poetic film.

Greece's geographical location and extensive, island-fringed coastlines have long made it a natural stopping-point for people from the Middle East seeking better opportunities elsewhere, with consequences that have become a major domestic political concern in the country over the last few years. This wider picture isn't part of Bakhtiari's remit - instead, his reportage examines the human cost of the situation. Sequences in Amir's unofficial guest-house alternate with external footage in which Bakhtiari accompanies Mohsen and company on their forays into the city, where they're in constant fear of attracting official attention. Through the film you get to know another face of Athens. escale-kaveh-bakhtiari-migrants-athenes-clandestin

Claas Danielsen, DOK Leipzig director, described the film in his opening talk last week in Leipzig:

"And those who see the young Iranians in Kaveh Bakhtiari's film Stop-Over while they desperately risk their lives to arrive in the West, next time they see images of irregular immigrants in the high-security borders of Europe they won't be able to look indifferently the other way."

I myself will never forget the curtain of this small apartment. This image haunts me every time I pass by a basement in Athens.

The film is this year's CineDoc premiere on October 8 2014, 20.00 at the French Institute in Athens (31, Sina Str.).
The film will be followed by a discussion led by journalist Maria Psara, a Migrant Kitchen event by Culinary Backstreets Athens and Give Hope Charity Foundation, and live music from the Eastern-Mediterranean region by Michalis Klapakis and his group Ta Daktyla tis Ekatis.