In the late 1970s, a reservoir is built on the River Mornos to supply the capital with water. An entire riverside village, Velouchovo, must be abandoned – a forced destruction that seems like a sacrifice in the name of progress. But there is another sacrifice, too: that of an ancient city that once flourished on the same banks and that now, just as it was beginning to be uncovered by the archaeologists, will be flooded forever. Insightful and elegiac, Costas Vrettakos’ film extends in multiple directions at once: a melancholy record of the decay of a traditional community in the mountains of Phocis and a thoughtful archaeological documentary, Layer of Destruction can also be viewed as a gripping thriller, an archetypal struggle of memory against oblivion, as the excavators fight to save the traces of the ancient city from the water level that rises day by day, swallowing everything in its wake. And if the film perceives History as a palimpsest of destruction, if it comments on indifferent and amoral nature that erodes everything, surrendering all to oblivion, its gaze is not a pessimistic one: it is from the viewer’s questioning of what is worth saving and what is not that the memory of the future will be born.
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