The camera is in the driver’s seat, in the first person. Turns follow one after the other and in a quick montage we are from Kavalas Avenue to Aspropyrgos and before we know it we are already on the boat to Kefalonia. There’s a piece of debris stuck to the windshield, but the director doesn’t seem to care. After all, that’s how the main duo act: unrepentant, real, really awkward when they first meet. But when the ice is broken, when the awkwardness goes away and there are points of contact, half an hour after the beginning of the film, a piece of music begins to play imposingly.

He is like the Horus of an ancient tragedy, waiting impatiently backstage long enough to speak. The keys of an old analog synthesizer take us back to the early 80s, to a world full of 3:4 TV frames and melancholy echoes of the 70s. Theme written by Stamatis Spanoudakis for the television adaptation of The Treasure of Vagia by Georges Sarri, Nani Moretti’s wanderings to Pasolini’s grave in My Favorite Diary and The Hook by Giorgos Hatsinassios, somehow, in the hands and mind of the talented musician and composer Lefteris Volanis, become as a whole and bring the pearls of the past into the future.

The sounds he sculpted are so touching that they remain indelible both inside and outside the film. After three minutes they have disappeared, but they continue to resound in the mind. In 78 minutes, they play only three times (and only two or three minutes at a time), and yet without them this film would be very different.

The musical theme of the film “Magnetic Fields” takes us back to the early 80s.

“I wanted to write a soundtrack for the car itself, something like my own theme song,” the composer tells us. Indeed, in “Magnetic Fields” by Giorgos Gusis, this old, modest, worn-out car, which, like a cursed, hypnotized, humble and wary, wanders together on an empty island, claims the first role and wins it. Its lights move ghostly across the silent landscape, and behind their dim glow, a man and a woman are seen wandering the island, immersed in the humid, mystical, wintry Ionian Sea.

Kefalonia, with its otherworldly energy and its almost living, eerie industrial relics (old stone lighthouses, wind farms, and mountain air force bases with giant radars) completes the couple’s quests, she is both the main character and the host. Their dialogues are largely improvised, familiarly real: we, the audience, could compose them hours before we started watching the film.

“You see yourself in the film precisely because it gives you the right to do so,” Lefteris Volanis tells us. The same feeling is evoked by our conversation with Giorgos Gusis, who considers the film not “his own”, but the result of the creative experience of a group of employees.

Nearly five months after its rave reception in theaters, the film will become the official Greek nomination for the 95th Academy Awards. What made her so loved domestically and equally touched by international audiences? Rather, the ease of George Goosis to sow lightning, while at the same time laughing in their faces with the most sweeping self-mockery. And he does all this from the most modest materials. In the words of Lefteris Volanis: “There may not be quantity in Magnetic Fields, but there is truth and simplicity – and that is sometimes enough.”