“For Leucada has no beginning, and no end…” Considered the first creative documentary in Greek cinematic history, this short homage shot by Roviros Manthoulis as his debut film on the island of Lefkada in 1958, commissioned by the Hellenic Press Office, is nothing short of a voyage through a land that takes the poetry of everyday life as its guide, since every image – be it sweeping or small – of this stunningly beautiful island is “translated” via the voice-over into a story forged from many ages of myths and traditions. Impressionistic in its gaze, lyrical in its word, poetic in its references to the celebrated local bards Aristotelis Valaoritis and Angelos Sikelianos, and with Manthoulis clearly intent on capturing the very sensations of this isle, Leucada: The Island of the Poets bears something of the innocence and grandeur of an era that is no more. Meanwhile, as a work of documentary, it remains invaluable too across the decades as a historical record harking back to the beginnings of a documentary approach that slips free from matter-of-fact information and attempts instead to touch upon something deeper within the heartlands of people and places; one that also harks back to a rare cinematic reminiscence of a Greek summer devoid of tourists.
Roviros Manthoulis
Roviros Manthoulis (1929-2022), active as a teenager in the anti-Nazi resistance, studied political science in Athens and then cinema in New York. He directed fiction films – for example, Hands Up Hitler (1963) and Face to Face (1966) – but his obsession was documentary. Exiled to Paris during the dictatorship, he worked for French television. In 1975, he became for one year the artistic director of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). He later traveled, making documentaries for French television. In the early 1980s, he was again called upon to contribute to the improvement of Greek television, but eventually devoted himself to the creation of the television series Ungoverned cities (1983-1986) and the documentary Greek Civil War (1997) and its six-hour television version. In the 1990s, he performed an important role as a mediator of cultural relations between Greece and France, while also working to highlight the educational role of television.