Photo by Alexandros Petrakis.
On the third night of the festival, we walk down a hill past a line of cars, past a fence, and find seats in the nearly full rows of plastic chairs. We face a glowing screen, and behind the screen is an old church that spends its summer hosting a children’s camp, and behind that, a stripe of orange sky that presses up against the flash of Aegean Sea, turning the color blue electric, like a fish you’d need a special type of light to see. At our backs there are three wide rows of cars, presumably tuning their radios to the proper station. In lieu of lights dimming, the sunset fades, and an intro that oscillates between Greek and English sets up the opening three short films we are going to see tonight. The first two are brief romantic memories of a black and white Paris, captured by the raw spirit of a new camera purchased by two friends, directors Nikos Theodosiou and Teos Romvos. The third film, Follow Them, takes Romvos and his wife, Chara Pelekanou, as its subjects. Both are artists and activists on Syros, the Greek island we have all gathered on for the tenth anniversary of the film festival.
The film sets us at the table with the couple as they discuss their relationship and their role in the Aegean Network, a conservation effort to mitigate the disasters brought on by chaotic, unregulated tourism—the kind locals have watched overrun their Cycladic neighbors of Mykonos and Santorini. In a wonderfully grounded act, Romvos and Pelekanou have founded a geopark, an alternative form of eco-tourism that conserves rather than develops, celebrating the unique geology of the Cycladic islands. Enormous rocks sprung from the earth, called eclogites, are specific to Syros—it’s one of only two places in the world that they are known to crest above ground, and Follow Them shows us one. It really is a massive rock, with a conical shape, jutting up from below like a warning. The film gifts those of us who are already tourists on Syros with an elevated role; in our flimsy chairs we become the ideal tourist, the responsible tourist, as we too admire the rock. Evi Kalogiropoulou, the film’s director, then overlays the image of the eclogite on top of Romvos and Pelekanou speaking, eclipsing everything but the tops of their heads and their voices, foregrounding the nature of Syros much in the same way that their activism does. She also splices in clips from Romvos’ own films, including the ones we have seen earlier tonight. The result is textural, an exercise in recombination, as the fabric of film gets stretched over itself.
When it finishes, there’s a break for free ice cream from a local shop and free beer and wine. We take our seats again for The Petrified Forest (1936)—Humphrey Bogart’s breakout role. I have heard from all the staff members that tonight is usually everyone’s favorite night of the festival, particularly the locals. The drive-in is the only drive-in in the Cyclades, created by and for the festival once a year. Plus, Syros usually programs a film with a wider appeal than most of its selections, like a Hollywood classic, as it has done tonight. The Petrified Forest is a kind of foil for the festival’s theme this year—“Topos,” the Greek word for place and location—given that the film is virtually all set in a studio-constructed no-man’s-land, a diner in the Arizona desert, somewhere near the titular Petrified Forest. It’s a nice parallelism that both of the longer films of the evening are interested in rare geological formations.
The movie begins. Leslie Howard, a vagabond romantic and failed writer, arrives at the diner where Bette Davis works and the two strike up a heavy-handed flirtation, with long uninterrupted monologues that make obvious the film’s origin as a Broadway play. The transliteration of play to movie is apt for a Greek festival with a “Topos” theme; film acts out its own temporal and geographical transcendence in the very birthplace of tragedy and comedy. In its vestigial minimalism, the movie feels acutely anachronistic but still the audience is rapt—there’s an enduring suspense built into the eighty-two minutes we spend inside the not-quite claustrophobic diner. A man in a wheelchair inches closer to the screen, his cigarette dispensing moody smoke. Later in the film, when Bogart’s villainous gangster Duke Mantee takes refuge in the restaurant, Howard’s pedantic speech does not change in the face of grave danger. I smile painfully: of course, the writer does nothing. Before the film ends, he’s shot dead by Bogart (at his own foolish request). Thanks to the unshakable feeling that we are watching a work made for the theatre, it is easy to remember that these characters are just that, characters; I am not as sad that Davis and Howard can’t be together as I am glad that he has finally stopped talking.
Afterwards, I walk with some festival volunteers down a dusty road. We talk about the movies of the night in disjointed fragments, since unlike me, most of them are on the production team and were not able to leave their posts ushering in cars, guiding guests to bathrooms, and distributing drinks. Our activity while we walk, of recalling brief scenes and transitions with enthusiasm, is familiar. It’s become the most common way that we encounter films online, on our feeds, and we bounce the moments around until they feel larger than they were. Though we have not put our thumbs out, a Greek woman stops her car and tells us to get in. She is alone and has seen the movie alone, and does not want to talk, though I try. Five minutes later, we arrive at a parking lot static with red tail lights; she selflessly lets us out while she goes to look for a spot. The festival’s famed Komito Beach party is in full swing, an annual tradition free for anyone on the island. I stand by the water talking to people I have met, people I have sold tickets to earlier that day. We are under an improbable amount of stars, a rash of milky way that spreads with no discernible beginning or end. The party and the night are similar. There are no taxis until the morning, and when day comes it is quicker than expected—a soft, diffuse transition. It reminds me of something said offhandedly earlier in the day, that it can be disorienting to have ocean on all sides. But by morning, festival-goers, volunteers, and locals alike have set up camp, have grounded themselves in place—lying on loungers and stringing hammocks between lone trees. Around six thirty AM I start to see a rock in the middle of the ocean, stable and certain, radiating rose gold with a shape tidier and smaller, but not unsimilar to the eclogite from the film. There’s the faint outline of a fisherman’s boat in front of it. I swim out towards it.
***
Photo by Alexandros Petrakis.
In the back seat of another small, nondescript, extremely European car, we stall in a parking lot. It’s my first day in Syros—I have just arrived this morning to join a group of sixteen other volunteers to set up and help run this summer’s Syros International Film Festival (SIFF). A man says something to the driver of the car that should be muttered but isn’t. As the only two Americans on the team, neither of us understand him, but Anna, a Greek volunteer in the front seat says, “I hate this kind of fucking Greek man,” very matter-of-factly and at a normal volume. I don't know the type, but I know the feeling and immediately I like her. Later that night, when we are leaving Komito Beach on the volunteer orientation tour, Anna and I sit in the back seat of the car. She is from Thessaloniki and staying in Syros ideally through the end of the summer, looking for a cafe job to make some money while enjoying island life. It’s a plan I hear from young Greek people more than a few times over the course of the long weekend. Outside her window the landscape is sparse, and the colors shift slowly like the onset of a new season. She’s only been here a week but Anna has loved Syros so far. It’s different. The island has a very mysterious energy, she tells me, but a mystery without any darkness. The whole place feels like a stage, like a set. Like Romeo and Juliet, she adds without explanation. I take it to mean the picturesque balconies and slick marble streets, the striking neoclassical buildings that suggest a grand, fated romance. It’s one of the first islands she has visited as a young person and found opportunities for more creative pursuits—like working at SIFF. It’s not one of those islands, she tells me, where nothing is happening.
The next day, the first of the festival, I sell tickets in a kiosk that we spend the morning setting up in the main square of town, straining on tiptoe to string canvas curtains that shield from persistent sun. I sell tickets to Australians, Belgians, many Greeks, and a couple of Canadians. We sell tickets for the first night and the second night and, to some, for all four nights. To anyone who approaches the kiosk in English, I explain the films, how each night takes place in a different location on the island, and how tickets function as day passes for the multiple movies screened each night. When they speak Greek, my coworker takes over and seems to talk for twice as long. We also sell tote bags, posters, and a special publication that commemorates the decade-long history of the festival. The approximate breakdown of attendees is one third Syros locals, one third visitors from other parts of Greece, and one third international tourists. There’s a pleasing balance of those who have come specifically for the events, and those who have just stumbled upon them.
After our shift, we go to a taverna and exchange our meal vouchers. We have a lot of time to talk since the cook is off for 20 minutes, on a boat somewhere. The two Greek volunteers who I walked over with get tall beers, and soon another group of volunteers joins us from the beach. One of them, Antonia, is from Syros and studying film in Thessaloniki. I ask her about Syros being the capital, cultural and otherwise, of the Cycladic islands, and she tells me about the number of festivals that tumble through: ones dedicated to accordions, to organs, to dance. At film school, she explains, there’s a divide between the Marvel movie devotees and everyone else, but in her third year she’s realized that okay, all movies have their place. Her favorite film is Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution because of how the twist is unfurled. “How did they do that so perfectly?” she asks me genuinely, like we have just seen the movie together. Giorgos is from Thessaloniki and studying engineering in Syros, where he lives alone and uses the school’s equipment to produce his own radio show. When I ask about film opportunities in Greece, they tell me they don’t feel the need to move elsewhere, that there’s plenty going on here already. At the end of the meal, half of the table orders coffee. I am told a Greek coffee is essentially a Turkish coffee. “But we’re in Greece,” Giorgos says, “so we say everything is Greek.”
Photo by Alexandros Petrakis.
The second night of the festival takes place in Tarsanas Shipyard, a dirt lot by the sea where boats have been parked for repairs and maintenance since 1860. As we arrange chairs and set up tables for merchandise, the yard is clearly still in use: a woman in a green bikini scrubs the front of her boat barefoot. I am sent to check on the bathrooms and adjust toilet paper and towels while the clouded mirror reflects another perfect sunset. I walk back and join a group of volunteers sitting under the wings of a catamaran speedily eating dinner out of brown boxes. When I point out to a new friend two geese having sex, it is met as a non-event. At 8:53 pm, there is a long line of people hoping for tickets as Saber Rider, a sound artist who will live-score the silent film about Bauhaus architects at sea, sets up her equipment by the screen. Like the previous night, the showing is sold out.
That I am working at the festival seems almost the best way to see the films. From the very first night, the films have linked together a narrative of labor and laborers. The festival’s opener, The Embroidered Island, a short documentary about Syros from 1965, was introduced by the filmmaker’s son in a speech that emphasized his father’s love of cinema and lifelong goal to make a feature film. Intended to promote tourism and highlight the uniqueness of Syros, the film also focused on the island’s industrial and working-class roots. Afterwards, the festival screened Talking about Trees, a Sudanese film that follows four previously-exiled filmmakers on their quest to open an outdoor cinema in Sudan under the rigorous eye of the government. In both, there’s a deep love for movies and what movies can do not only for their audiences but also for their makers. They are films about making movies happen, the same sentiment that drives the volunteers, and for that matter, the entire festival.
Another current that runs throughout the long weekend is that of archives—fitting given this is the festival’s tenth anniversary, with a commemorative publication that participates in the process of archiving the festival itself. Part of my job is passing out flyers for a free interactive exhibit in which viewers can engage firsthand with old photographs of Syros. The festival also screened You Shall Not Disband Us, a short meditation on class warfare in Syros during the early 20th century. The film is a product of a previous festival workshop in which director Jazra Khaleed mined archives of the island, compiling old images and footage to bear witness to otherwise glossed over tensions of the past.
Archives too require labor, process, excision. Archives are work, the work of sifting through the memories of a place and scrambling the sequences, of finding your story. While “Topos” is its announced theme, this year’s festival reveals filmmaking as a truly embodied process, a collection of efforts that take corporeal form. And the festival’s greatest success is escalating film-watching to the same, embodied plane: we watch the movie about building an outdoor cinema in the town’s outdoor cinema. We watch The Petrified Forest in a transformed browning field—a nowhere guests drive (or taxi) 25 minutes to, while the free ice cream served is bourbon flavored, inspired by the film’s similarly constructed Western setting. Le Corbusier sips coffee and smokes aboard a cruise conference on screen as the audience is surrounded by the silhouettes of boats, the sea humming under the rhythmic live score. Each night there are around three different films programmed, which keeps it all from feeling obvious. Rather, it’s like an excellent professor’s syllabus, where there’s a vague idea of how the readings relate, but ultimately you place your faith in the actual time spent sitting in class.
Possibly my favorite film of the weekend concludes the night at the shipyard, a Ukrainian observational documentary called A Tall Tale by Lucia Babjaková Nimocá. Despite being made in 2016, Jacob Moe, the festival’s co-founder, introduces the film with a hint of context about the ongoing war in Ukraine, relating it tenuously to the idea of Topos as it pertains to the European continent as a whole. The film cements this connection on its own. It’s collected footage of elderly couples singing folk songs in western Ukraine. Each song is more vulgar than the next. But what I get stuck on is the wide, still shots, and brusque, somewhat tuneless voices and the idiosyncratic interiors of these people’s homes with so many different kinds of floral prints. Each floral print is a history and together they clash so well. Each frame of the film is a perfect photograph, and the photos have a perfect set design, and all of these sets are real people’s homes and lives. It is easier, or more tolerable, to focus on the spaces. When I think about the depth of love and labor that went into each of these homes, the years marked by scraps of fabrics and chipped pots and tchotchkes, and then I think about the instant in which similar homes have been destroyed in the past few months, the basin of the shipyard becomes hollow like the hull of a ship itself, and fills with a perceptible grief.
I am told, by the volunteer I’m selling tickets with, about the two kinds of ancient Greek time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is the way we commonly understand time, equally divided units of measurement like minutes or hours. Kairos understands better the emotional valences of these units and weights them accordingly; it’s able to describe the way some moments are more valuable, or more perfect, than others. Miraculously, whether working in the heat of noon or listening to a sound performance engineered via magnetic tape, I realize there’s a spell on Syros in which the two begin to approximate each other. The valuable moments of the weekend are paced so frequently, at such even intervals, it’s as though they’ve been set in place by a talented jeweler.
Photo by Matthieu Croizier.
The beach in Ermoupoli, the capital of the island, is a stone slab broken off like a piece of chocolate, sprinkled with colorful towels, straw umbrellas, and children hurling themselves off the concrete ledge into a gradient of blue. Pastel neoclassical buildings line the coast all the way down, clinging to the sea. At one point over the weekend, the festival’s lawyer tells me it is his favorite beach in the world. I look at him in disbelief. It’s lovely, I say, but this is Greece. I’ve seen the pictures. He doesn’t budge. He could spend five days there, entirely blissed out. The lawyer has been coming to the festival since 2018, when he first worked here as a volunteer—now he writes contracts for us to sign. Later, once I’m back home, I understand his love better; the dock lingers in memory—its cool, glassy swims wonderful and welcome between busy shifts.
On the last night we gather here, at the “beach,” for a closing performance, in which rattling luminescent traditional boats of Syros appear out of thin air on the water and titter towards us. They look perfect, like the stars have materialized on the surface of the sea. Like out of a myth, the stars have been turned by the gods into fishing boats, and those boats are before us now, wishing us well. It’s yet another tribute to the island’s history, maritime heritage, working class—and it’s a beautiful one. The volunteers serve the attendees gazpacho and anchovy toasts, tsipouro mixed with lemonade. It’s very festive and everyone seems exhausted, and happy.
I thought it would be difficult to verify the things that I had heard and read about Greece once I got there but everyone was so warm and open; the same candor and familiarity that characterized the festival’s films also ran through the people I met. The movies not only connected attendees to their subjects, people they may never otherwise encounter, but also created a camaraderie between them—Sudanese intellectuals, famed dead architects, a cook from Syros, and activists Romvos and Pelekanou all lived on screen as if the camera wasn’t there. On my ferry back to Athens, I talk with a Greek police officer for three hours; it’s as though I enter the frame. I ask him, cautiously, if in Greece people like police officers. He laughs and says no. He asks me a lot of questions. At one point, when there is a lull, he asks me if there is anything in particular that I want to know is true or false about Greece and Greek people? I cannot believe my research gets so embarrassingly easy.
Later, a friend and I walk up the slopes of the Acropolis, stunningly hot with the reflective surfaces of old and maintained marble glaring at us. She seems agitated by a lack of words, explaining to me that it’s hard to describe energy. She used to work in a crystal shop, and I've been asking her about the crystals on the new jewelry we bought in Syros right before leaving. She tells me that you have to cleanse the stones and set intentions for them, but I don't ask how you set the intentions because the incline is steep now, and she seems to be out of breath. Anyways, it feels like we are walking among some of the most intentional buildings in the world. It feels like maybe those secrets are still deep in the archive.
But for an extra-long weekend on Syros, intention is tapped like a well. There is enough energy swirling to charge the whole island.