Violence in the Greece of nihilism will be the subject of the 50-year-old director's next film
A mirror of the Greek reality, with intense socio-political reflection on issues of identity, gender and race, the work of director Constantinos Giannaris needs no introduction. The immigration, the alienation, subculture and the fringes are the director's stimuli in restless cinematographic creations such as "From the Edge of the City", the "Fifteenth of August", "Homer" and recently "Man at sea".
And while "Man at sea" has not yet found distribution, his tireless and perpetually restless 50-year-old director is already working on the script for his next film. "It's a scenario inspired by the surrounding violence and the general nihilism that now dominates in Greece" Giannaris told us a while ago by phone from the Peloponnese, where he comes from. Challenging as always, Giannaris "christened" his film "Kalashnikov". Not strange at all, since this particular Russian weapon is one of the most characteristic symbols of violence in Greece and constantly dominates the news, "above all in Athenian society", as the director characteristically said.
If everything goes according to’ please, the 2012 it is predicted to be an active year for K. Giannari. During the last Thessaloniki Festival, last November, where Giannaris was honored with the screening of all his films, Lawrence Cardis, senior curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (and president of the Jury of the festival of which Giannaris was a member), excited about "Shards", the experimental filmed diaries of the Greek director. In fact, the thought of Mr. Cardis is to present "Fragments" at MoMA next season, while, as told to us by Mr. Giannaris, "Fragments" may also play in the Image Forum, a major festival held in Tokyo and Yokohama.
"Fragments" is the general title with which K. Giannaris christened the film notes he kept for years (and still does). Avid filmmaker, the K. Giannaris, where he goes, he carries a camera with him. Today a digital one, formerly a Super 8. And it pulls everything. Like notes. "As a writer in my position would make notes in a notebook or a painter would make sketches, that's how I film too. And then I put them aside".
But it seems that at some point he remembered them and decided to combine them into two "chapters" of a total duration of about three and a half hours. They have images from Giannaris' life in London, where he studied and made cinema, personal matters, erotically, even more difficult, such as the funeral of a cousin.
In everything,what about the "troubled" latest film of "Man at sea", the K. Giannaris hopes to hit theaters this winter, because it is "a film that has gone through many waves and is now looking for its contact with the audience". At the moment it has not managed to find distribution in Greece, despite her participation in last year's Berlin Festival (Panorama) and at the Thessaloniki Festival a few months ago, where it was shown with a new edit.
Giannaris still believes that the filming of "Man at sea" was the most difficult of his career, but he adds: "This plan was ambitious and had a sense of vanity in relation to the meager budget. It was a big undertaking done under unbearable pressure". According to the director anyway, the film's producer George Lykiardopoulos is busy finding a distributor.
Both in Thessaloniki and at the Film Library and also at the Sorbonne University, where he recently gave seminars on his work, the K. Giannaris once again felt the joy of enjoying his films as a simple viewer. "When you're on set or in the editing process, you lose emotional contact with the event you yourself create" he told us. "You need at least five years _ especially in feature films with the difficulties and traumas of filming _ to be able to watch them as a viewer. And when that happens, as it happened to me, the feeling is great".
