“Northern Greece. 1994. A day in summer. A special day. 30th of June. The Feast of the Holy Apostles. We are in Sohos, 50 kilometres northeast of Thessaloniki. Once, 10,000 people lived in this place. Today most of them are in exile, some in Germany and others in Canada.” Against the backdrop of a Greece that is being deserted, awaiting “special days” to recall something of its glorious past, one tradition endures through the passage of time as a constant reminder: wrestling matches on the threshing floor at the edge of the village, with young men from Sohos and Serres wrestling until nightfall, accompanied by traditional street musicians until the final fall. Tomorrow everyone will leave and the village will be deserted again. But first, Yiannis Lambrou, with a gaze that dares to be simultaneously naturalistic and lyrical, melancholic and at times homoeroticly Dionysian, will have journeyed along the paths of “black and white” action as it collides with “coloured” stillness – inseparable parts of the same ritual ceremony. And with two male bodies locked together in sweat at its centre – as if coming from antiquity and heading towards eternity – he will have contributed decisively to the great conversation about human bodies which, at the end of the day, conceal within them nothing but places still uncharted.
Giannis Lambrou
Yiannis Lambrou was born in 1954 in Euboea. He studied at the ‘Eugenia Hatzikou’ film school, as well as at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He worked mainly on documentary films, which established him as one of the leading documentary filmmakers of the new generation. He served as General Secretary and Vice President of the Greek Directors Guild from 2000 to 2005, while from March 2008 he was General Secretary of the Greek Documentary Network. He taught documentary theory at New York College. He passed away on 19 April 2011.