The Last One Never Laughs
A journalist, who has lost his identity, visits an uncanny land, in which the smile is banned by law. He feels lost in its dystopia, consisted of self-destructive people, who deplore the smile. He gains many personal experiences that make him unaware of his aim and his human state as well. Will he eventually be able to find a way out?
Stratis Alvanos, Theodosis Giannoulis, Emmanouil Kouphakes, Ioanna-Anastasia Fakinou, Dimitris Liapis, Mary Apostolidou, Christos Giannoulis, Diana Cherkasova
Related Works
This video was created as part of the work for the art class of technical images. It was named lock down as it takes place during the second quarantine and shows two parallel lives of people and how each of them experiences their confinement. The idea, the shots and the editing are by Markella Floka and the music was entirely edited by Dimitris Pantelis.
Τhis piece refers to a suffocating relationship between a father and a son. This oppressive relationship is expressed by the father’s obsessive calls to the son to come and eat his food warm. The son lives in an imperative rhythm of breakfast/lunch/dinner with few getaways because his father never stops calling him, while having a piercing voice. The father lives in a rhythm of constant orthostatic food production. A very elastic son, a very rigid father. A piece of wood, also rigid, who attracts the son. She had been washed by the sea. The highest boiling temperature is at sea-level. Splashing and seething became one. Apnea and immersion in his father’s pot, which is the symbol of his influence, eventually are leading to his release. He tightened so tight on her that for the first time he was stabilised. They were swept away from the waves and while floating they turned into furniture.
A portrait of Antonis, a homeless man living in the old town of Corfu.
This artwork consists of multiple videos of scrolls down found in well-known social media, which were taken by smart phone and are displayed in a horizontal layout and continuous flow. On a second reading and as the viewer moves away from the individual information, he or she realizes that the Greek flag is formed in the video. The artwork seeks to ask questions about the ever-increasing use and abuse of social media in Greek everyday life. Being sometimes means of communication and information and sometimes tools of manipulation, social media make people concern and strongly influence society in its entirety, while the posts of their multiple users are now an integral part of our modern (digital) public space.
The fulfillment of a last wish leads Filippo to a retrospection from the mountains of Epirus to the recent past of the year 1945. His meeting with his history revives the memory of a whole village, unfolding the relations and the bonding of two peoples against the commands of an era, which is not as far as we think.
The film refers to the pandemic crisis of covid-19 in the country, after the enforcement of the restriction measures. It observes the everyday life of the town centre of Corfu. It includes the randomness of recording the reality, the contradictions and the paradox of it. It attempts to render the suffocating atmosphere, that has a huge impact on the everyday life and the psychology of the people.
It’s Monday, the 13th of December 1943, the small town of Kalavryta is set on fire by the occupation army of Nazi Germany while the entire male population is being gathered on a nearby hill and shot dead. This war crime will go down in history, along with the massacre of Acqui Division, as the largest mass killing in Greece during WWII. Three men who witnessed these events as kids, locked up with the rest women, children and elderly people in Kalavryta’s primary school, recall this traumatic experience.
Paraphrase, reference of the title to the depression caused by the shocking images of drowned children in the Mediterranean, the watery grave of persecuted refuges.
