Prespes

“A corner of Greece. Prespes.” So begins the documentary short that Takis Hatzopoulos shot in 1966, the first major act of a journey that would inevitably lead him to Gazoros Serron  in 1974 and from there to his time on the TV documentary series Paraskinio, an inexhaustible hothouse of films and filmmaking talent. Hatzopoulos chronicles this one corner of Greece, where a lake divides people into nationalities, in 14 minutes, with obvious echoes not only of the documentation but also of the fiction of Takis Kanellopoulos as it is captured in the black and white photography of Syrakos Danalis, the music of Kostas Mylonas, and the voice-over of Angelos Antonopoulos. The stultifying daily routine, the unvarying days following one after the other, the border that ultimately separates those who remember and those who wait, the hardest hour of the day – nightfall – a circle of life without “the possibility of a surprise,” a “simple world” that says good morning in three languages, becomes through Hatzopoulos’ gaze a small, melancholy ode on the beauty and heartache of a place. It is also a biting commentary on the wider Greece that would dismiss concepts such as tolerance, coexistence, and simplicity, eventually crossing the border and destroying the sacred balance between the insignificant and the significant that is respected only by those who have learned to look at God from the measure of a man.