Directing
The Idomeni refugee camp housed people from the Middle East who were trying to cross the border into Europe. When the Greek police closed the camp, the refugees resisted and blocked a railway line used to deliver goods. Maria Kourkouta’s minimalist documentary not only observes these events but also presents carefully modeled static images that open up the space within and without the frame of view, and in the closing black-and-white sequence offers a poetic commentary. The result is a bleak portrait of a place where endless lines of refugees try to preserve the final remnants of their individual freedoms. “This film is a call to welcome the refugees that cross the European borders, as well as the ghosts that return with them.”
"A series of photographs of the feet of random passers-by in the New York subway." - from the Midnight Sun Film Festival catalog 2023
The tale of an encounter...
Images of a small boatyard, somewhere in Greece. Between the repairs and the boats’ departures, a team of men haul them ashore and set them afloat again. A 16 mm film built around gestures and movements that oscillate between a toing and froing, attachment and detachment, tension and tenderness.
Insignificant fragments, reworked, reassembled, slowed down, put in loops, of Greek popular movies of the 50s and 60s. These fragments are accompanied by short extracts of poems written by Greek authors and by Manos Hadjidakis'music. It is a found footage movie, a collage which evokes a return journey to contemporary Greece, in the center of Athens. – Light Cone
A short film by Maria Kourkouta.
Piece based on a cinematographic work that links found-footage (images from Greek cinema produced during a tense period between civil war and dictatorship) with a work on the rhythmicity of images. Bodies in movement thereby truly create a dance of the ambient air.
