Journey to Mytilene (2010)
Director: Lakis Papastathis
Country: Greece
Runtime: 1h 45mn
Kostas returns to his homeland Mytilene in Lesbos, a Greek island in the Northern Aegean Sea, to settle down the details about the inheritance of the family house. He left the place twenty years ago to study in Paris and he never went back. Now his return forces him to deal with the traumas of the past. He obviously studied cinema and is able to watch the world from the safe distance provided by the lens of the camera. He’s gradually reconciled with both the living and the dead. And eventually this experience helps him not only to regain the love for his homeland but also to come in terms with his own self.
Papastathis (Theofilos 1987, The Only Journey of His Life 2001) as a pioneer documentary director belongs to the generation of film-makers that established the so-called “new Greek cinema” of late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He came to fiction films only much later shooting his first feature film in 1981. Like other late-bloomers of new Greek cinema he retained the formal awareness of Angelopoulos cinema trying at the same time to find a distinctly individual style. He met with great difficulties to make films at a regular rate, especially at a time when film as an art in Greece had a limited domestic and international support. So this is just the fourth feature film in thirty years from a director who is unanimously considered ‘important’ by Greek film critics although he’s simultaneously been accused of 'formalism' or, even worst, of morbid infatuation with the decay and the death. But there’s nothing here to be scared of except for some extensive use of POV camera - if this can be frightening - combined with repeated flash-backs and ceaseless switch from b&w to colour and vice versa. ‘Journey to Mytilene’ is mostly a nostalgic, tender and humane film.
Country: Greece
Runtime: 1h 45mn
Kostas returns to his homeland Mytilene in Lesbos, a Greek island in the Northern Aegean Sea, to settle down the details about the inheritance of the family house. He left the place twenty years ago to study in Paris and he never went back. Now his return forces him to deal with the traumas of the past. He obviously studied cinema and is able to watch the world from the safe distance provided by the lens of the camera. He’s gradually reconciled with both the living and the dead. And eventually this experience helps him not only to regain the love for his homeland but also to come in terms with his own self.
Papastathis (Theofilos 1987, The Only Journey of His Life 2001) as a pioneer documentary director belongs to the generation of film-makers that established the so-called “new Greek cinema” of late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He came to fiction films only much later shooting his first feature film in 1981. Like other late-bloomers of new Greek cinema he retained the formal awareness of Angelopoulos cinema trying at the same time to find a distinctly individual style. He met with great difficulties to make films at a regular rate, especially at a time when film as an art in Greece had a limited domestic and international support. So this is just the fourth feature film in thirty years from a director who is unanimously considered ‘important’ by Greek film critics although he’s simultaneously been accused of 'formalism' or, even worst, of morbid infatuation with the decay and the death. But there’s nothing here to be scared of except for some extensive use of POV camera - if this can be frightening - combined with repeated flash-backs and ceaseless switch from b&w to colour and vice versa. ‘Journey to Mytilene’ is mostly a nostalgic, tender and humane film.
