Lying upon a Rock
A documentary about Lazaretto, the desert islet near the city of Corfu that functioned for centuries as a quarantine station as well as a place of execution for political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. The identity of the place is approached through fragmentary testimonies and original sources.
Spyros Kavvadias, Dimitris Gkrintzos, Andreas Vouliakis, Margarita Chalakatevaki
Related Works
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.
The portrait of a young, lonely man in a foreign country, whose only consolation is smoking. The documentary observes his daily life: He lives with the basics and wanders in the city. His grief comes from the fact that he is alone without his family.
The main subject of this thesis is to analyze the special effects that George Melies used and invented, as well as the creation of a short film with special and visual effects, inspired by Melies’ work. This film has been implemented using modern techniques, aiming for an outcome that seems realistic but cannot actually happen in real life. All the techniques that have been used to create the film will be analyzed in depth.
A place of relative isolation and no influence from the outside environment. Black cloth with a small opening that the viewer enters wearing headphones and playing a soundscape I created on a magnifying glass.
The quarantine's experience time has functioned as a humanized time. Its previous social barbarity was imprisoned in the familiar cage of my soul and became my creation time. Each day was my friend, an eternal circular and dynamic present, a consciousness without conflicts. It was like an eternity that is experienced differently every moment. An unprecedented form of stillness gripped me and perpetuated in many abstract fragments which finally formed the new texture of my existence, in this peculiar isolation. I became from the carcass of time I was before, its qualitative disintegration… Reality was distorted and experienced illusively. The time from the alienation that was before, was transformed and became the cover for the scratched truth of myself. This kind of time my conscience had dreamed to live.
As Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" is one of my favorite paintings, I created an acoustic composition with the main goal of creating an atmosphere with a freer and more abstract approach. The small touches, the colors, the swirling flow, the natural landscape of the painting and the psychosynthesis of the artist are captured. The piece in combination with two images consists of three parts. In the first part, the night landscape is presented, in the second the intense emotions of the artist and in the third the nature with its power that calms the human soul.
With the opportunity of the preparation of the trip, the productive process of maintenance, repair and work in the area of the shipyard, the project "Forest of Winds" is created. The project was named "Forest of Winds" because of the sound of the wind passing through the masts of the boats. The "Forest of Winds" is a 360 video animation evolving into a theatrical space and indefinite time. The video depicts the invisible side of a dream, the dream of a journey and its preparation with the forms of workers hovering impersonal in space as work uniforms, creating a choreographed kinesiological narrative process. The forms of workers rub, shine and accomplish all kinds of jobs with their repetitive motions, until they are left in space like objects in an endless free fall.
