Kostas Vrettakos

Kostas Vrettakos (1938–2018), son of Nikiforos Vrettakos, was born in Athens and studied cinema in Greece and Italy. Alongside cinema, he earned his living as an editorial supervisor, producer of advertising films and, occasionally, as a journalist. During the Dictatorship, he worked as a translator of popular novels and as a photographer for encyclopaedias. His early literary collaborations with Epitheorisi Technis were followed by two poetry collections in 1971 and 1977 titled Anarithma. In parallel with his photographic activity, he began writing screenplays and directing his own films, among which stood out the documentary Layer of Destruction (1980) and the only feature film of his career, The Children of Helidona (1987). Meanwhile, he founded the publishing house Tria Fylla. In 1989, he began working in the political administration of Greek cinema, initially as Special Cinema Adviser to the Ministry of Culture (1989), then as President of the Greek Film Centre (1991–1998) and finally as Greece’s representative at Eurimages, at the Council of Europe (1991–2006). In 2009, he published the novel Passer-by from Reykjavik (Potamos Publications) and in 2016 the prose work Exercises in Curiosity (Potamos Publications), which was honoured with the Petros Haris Foundation Award of the Academy of Athens. In 2018, he published a poetry collection of his youthful poems titled Added Value (Polis Publications). He died in Athens on 6 November 2018, at the age of 80