On Sunday afternoon, seething reigned in the courtyard of the Spiritual Center of Chania. Its visitors and volunteers 10th Chania Film Festival they hurried with the name on their lips: Kostas Gavras. The great Greek-French director graced the event with his presence and at the same time was honored with a special event accompanied by the screening of his film. “Amen”. The latter so suffocatingly filled the main (otherwise spacious) hall of the Spiritual Center that there were small fights for the reserved seat, and several people watched standing from the “mountains”.

“It’s great that all these people came to see the film and listen to what we want to say, just as beautiful is this festival, which places in the region like Chania so much need,” Kostas Gavras tells me privately a little later. . . His eyes are shining with pleasure, he seems to me in general much more prosperous and cheerful than three years ago, when we met again in Venice, on the sidelines of an (exhausting) day of an interview for “Adults in the Room”.

Movie cameras

When I asked him about the posters for his films in front of the theater in Chania, he took the opportunity to talk about the importance of film education. “The posters are very beautiful, some of them I have never seen before because they are from other countries. But I liked the old cameras better, which are displayed in the same space. It’s kind of like… the archeology of cinema. Indeed, when we started making films, the cameras were huge, heavy, nothing to do with today’s cameras. This massive change affects everything from the design of the film to its cost and even the script itself. But it is important for the younger generation to know the history of cinema, how films are made, especially today, when there are all kinds of videos around them.”

Amen, shown as part of the Chania Festival, was filmed exactly two decades ago and tells the story of a German SS chemist who, with the help of a young priest, tries to uncover the crimes of the concentration camps and the Holocaust during World War II. “Two things from this film, in my opinion, are relevant today. The first concerns the act of resistance of these two people, which goes to the end and as a concept that is sorely lacking in our time ”- the word“ resistance ”and its meaning will be repeated again and again by the authors. summer director and during the ceremony.

“The second thing that the film shows is the attitude of the Pope, the Power is more political than religious, who at the time of the human crisis did not take a human position at all, which is unacceptable. Today we see the same thing happening to immigrants in Greece, France and other countries. How do we get them? Bad.” When I bring up the biggest issue of the day, the war in Ukraine, Gavras gets even bleaker. “It’s tragic that there’s a war going on in the middle of Europe after what we’ve experienced in the past. Absolutely absurd Putin’s invasion. There is, of course, another side. The President of France said that NATO in Europe was “brain dead”, and now, after the war, it is not only “resurrected”, but now America plays a leading role, as during the Cold War. This clearly suits her and at the same time weakens the Europeans.

New generation

When asked if he himself is currently preparing a film, he answers in the affirmative, without revealing more, but is much more willing to talk about the new generation of filmmakers and his own socio-political cinema, as his son Romain Gavras recently put it with Netflix’s Athena. “The younger generation is looking for their own way of telling stories. Romain and the others do this by creating a new cinematic character. They are mainly looking for the role that the image plays in the story, precisely because they live in the age of the image. This is fine”.

It is worth noting that the festival in Chania, which ends on October 29, has an additional rich program, which can be found on the website chaniafilmfestival.com. We singled out another very interesting photo exhibition there called “The View of Eternity”. Through the lens of Ilias Burjotis, the visitor passes through the unique universe of Theodoros Angelopoulos, whose death this year marks 10 years.