“And as evening fell, a revelation unfolded within him. He slowly realized that what he was seeking, what he was looking for, the beauty he was searching for, the fairy was the city itself. Kastoria!” The third part of the informal “excursion” to Macedonia – that began with Macedonian Wedding (1960) and continued with Thasos (1961) – Kastoria, with its foreign traveler on horseback seeking a fairy in the modern but rather timeless everyday life of the Macedonian city, closes a perfect cycle of uncompromising documentation right as the curtain rings down on the 1960s. Takis Kanellopoulos has now definitively exchanged history for myth (and its representation), and here he uses it as a bridge between past and present, finally mythologizing a city which, through his gaze, regains anew the characteristics of a rare Greekness, carved from Byzantine ghosts, ancient Greek outbursts, materials of soil and water that are stateless yet deeply rooted in a Greece that remains to be discovered. The film, produced by Giorgos Nasioutzik and awarded Best Short Documentary Film at the 1969 Thessaloniki Film Festival, was the least proprietary of its creator’s works and hard to find – even lost – over the years. It reappeared after a long absence in 2025, not in its original color version, through a network of collectors, providing the opportunity for a comprehensive study on Takis Kanellopoulos’s trilogy, a turning-point for creative documentary in Greece.
Takis Kanellopoulos
Takis Kanellopoulos was born in Thessaloniki in 1933 and died in 1990 of a heart attack. He was one of the first Greek directors to make films in Thessaloniki. He was honoured at the 7th Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1966, on the occasion of his film Excursion, for his contribution to raising the quality standards of the festival. At the 1968 Thessaloniki Festival, Interlude won the Greek Film Critics Association Award for Best Director, while the same film was awarded Best Art Film of the Year, jointly with Vassilis Georgiadis’s Girls in the Sun. Kanellopoulos’s filmography consists of three shorts and seven feature films.