FACES GEOGRAPHY

Tell me a few words about your cinematic influences.
 -There are many, varied, perhaps contradictory. Difficult to distinguish some. I would say, however, that European cinema is what charmed me, which was the occasion to discover cinema from another point of view.
 
6th feature film in Greece. How difficult is this particular task nowadays?
 -I started out as an outsider in Greek cinema, I made my films with tiny budgets and I was always a producer. At a time that films were made with a state-funded model, I created an alternative model of a hand-made film, based on a group of friends and collaborators, with Addio Berlin (1994). Yes, it's hard to do cinema, it's even harder today, it seems probably very difficult to have six movies, just like that, but I feel at the beginning.
 
Your films are always filming Athens. What pulls you into it? What do you like and what you do not?
 -The city is one of the things that interest me in the cinema. For me it is as important as the faces. The city is a peaple's geography. My last three films, 2000 + 1 Shots, Planet Athens, Three Days Happiness, cover three key periods of the decade in the history of the country through the history of Athens: the millennium, the Olympics, the crisis.

Although in the three films, the characters are in the foreground, at the same time the city is outlined, and through that our society. From this point, my films are political. What always keeps me fascinated in Athens is the hidden corners, secret passages, galleries, and open landscapes.
 
Even after six films with Athens as a protagonist, I do not feel that I've exhausted it. What repels me is the falsehood that I often see to manipulate and distort the sites.
 
In my films, space is always natural, and it is cinematographed as a face. I try to catch their underlying breath, the underground signs of life. I feel the need to scratch and touch below the surface. In Three Days Happiness there is a geography, which corresponds to the class position of characters. I choose nodal spaces, passages and I  film them trying to get their concentrated energy.
 
Why blue and not black and white (as you did in No Sympathy for the Devil) in the Three Days of Happiness?
-I started with two black and white films, Addio Berlin and No Sympathy for the Devil. The choice of black and white in both films at that time looked innovating but also strange. The reason was that I wanted to create an atmosphere that I had in my mind using only existing sites. Black and white was my basic tool. Three Days  Happiness were shot in a blue shade for the same reason. The choice of that color refers to the psycho-geography of the film and its characters, their feelings and the whole sense.  
 
 Can your new film be described as a "female film" through a male look? Were you in mind when you started the movie? Another similar movie that you like? –
Yes, it's a female film from a man's eyes. I wanted to make a film centered on female heroines, because they are living in a more harsh way the contradictions surrounding us. At the same time I wanted to make a female portrait that surpassed the personal story, so I chose three women from different social classes. I do not know if it has a relationship, but a movie with powerful women that comes to me right now is Ken Russell's "Women in Love".