Daphné Hérétakis

Niki is a resistance fighter living in a nightmarish dictatorship in Athens, 1972, and Lefteris is her son, who will be forced sooner or later to cut the thread that binds them together.

Athens 2014. Between bereaved desires and lost hopes, a film diary bangs against the walls of the city. The daily life of a country in crisis, the inertia of revolution, the individual issues that confront the political, questions of survival that confront ideals. Can we still ask the simplest questions?

Athens 2014. Between bereaved desires and lost hopes, a film diary bangs against the walls of the city. The daily life of a country in crisis, the inertia of revolution, the individual issues that confront the political, questions of survival that confront ideals. Can we still ask the simplest questions?

This film begun in september 2008, in Exarchia, "the Mecca" of athenian contestation. As the months passed and the political situation of Greece evolved, the film became the canvas on which testimonies finally laid, thus composing the fragmented landscape of a country in crisis.

Daphne Hérétakis proposes a protean reflection on cinétract, both activist, humorous and poetic. With her camera, she goes to meet the Athenians and collects their disillusions and their hopes. In view of the images, readers, scattered throughout the room, read excerpts from Greek poems.

As the song says: "I'm 26 years old but only 4 useful. I don't understand anything". 8 people read aloud private texts (sms, letters, emails) written or received by Daphné Hérétakis in the months leading up to her 26th birthday. The film proposes to take these texts out of the realm of intimacy and put them back into the public space and the collective nature of the film. The result is a romantic and absurd cadavre exquis, which addresses slightly depressed sensibilities.

Athens. Nothing seems to move. The locals seem as still as statues. While at the same time, somewhere, a caryatid is escaping from a museum and a small group of people demands the destruction of all antiques. Would film be the only way to avoid stone-cold indifference?

Athens. Nothing seems to move. The locals seem as still as statues. While at the same time, somewhere, a caryatid is escaping from a museum and a small group of people demands the destruction of all antiques. Would film be the only way to avoid stone-cold indifference?

In this shapeshifting essay film by French-Greek filmmaker Daphné Hérétakis, we visit the streets of Athens in July 2015 and the wake of an austerity referendum, finding friends and strangers, pop songs and poetry, fallen monuments and hopes for the future. It is a lyrical sketch of a time of personal and political transition – culminating in an image of liberating, apocalyptic possibility.

In this shapeshifting essay film by French-Greek filmmaker Daphné Hérétakis, we visit the streets of Athens in July 2015 and the wake of an austerity referendum, finding friends and strangers, pop songs and poetry, fallen monuments and hopes for the future. It is a lyrical sketch of a time of personal and political transition – culminating in an image of liberating, apocalyptic possibility.