His grief over the death of an award-winning director, producer and screenwriter Lucky Papastatiwho passed away early Wednesday morning at the age of 79 after a long battle with cancer, expresses Dionysius Savvopoulos.

Is Lakis dead? Just the day before yesterday we were talking together on the phone, we all knew that he was sick, but no, we did not think about it. And still…

He was a man strict with himself, whole, a creator with a depth of field, a romantic soul, my friend. Together we filmed the “Shadow Troupe” in Kittaros, “I’m glad, Savvopoulos” on TV, a video clip for “Chronopios”. He called me many times at Backstage to say something, and in the end, that’s where we first met. In Sinetica, behind the museum.

I happened to be hanging out with a friend, he introduced himself to me and asked me if I would like to watch his film Letter from America, which he had just filmed back there in the Muviola office. It made a big impression on me, not only because it was a minor masterpiece, but also because it was downright bold against the blurring of the new electronic cinema of the time. It was finally light. Like Pantelis Voulgaris then in Anna’s Embassy, ​​Papastatis – on a smaller scale – took a small and insignificant incident and made it big and important with his cinematic narrative.

He did the same later with his feature films, with the robbers of the beautiful, in their solitude and decline, with the weary traveler returning to his base in Mitylene, and with the pale angels, the artist Theophilos and the writer of short stories Visinus, where Papastatis sees their great splendor. and projects it on our behalf.

He was tall, slender, with a kind and somewhat pensive look. He looked deep into your eyes when he spoke to you and when he listened to you. He adored his teachers, director Alexis Damianos, professor Panagi Lekats. He often spoke about them, even wrote a book about the filming of Evdokia, where he was Damianos’ assistant. He spoke passionately about our young artists, American cinema, great literature. He has also released his own beautiful stories in the same vein as always, where the small and insignificant suddenly take on heights. It was swallowed up by the 19th century, the revolutionaries of the 21st, the philhellenes, but bits and pieces of the 20th: Pericles Yiannopoulos, for example, or Achilles Madras, or paintings and lithographs from the time of the war in Asia Minor. He did work on them. I think that Papastathis belongs to what we call the Greek line, quite in its own way. As a young man he was an officer in the Greek army in Cyprus. In the summer, when we rested together on Pelion, he told us stories from there. He believed what Sepheris had said: the miracle still lived.

On Tuesday I saw Kiritsopoulos and the conversation about Lakis, who was in the hospital, brought up this topic. It seems that the conversation influenced me, and last night I saw him in a dream: we were waiting for him with Aspa in a big club where we were invited, we found acquaintances there, we sat with them, and then other acquaintances came. and I was worried that Lakis was late and we wouldn’t find a place for him. But the program started and I was consumed. From a magical musician, a wonderful, such a happy melody came onto the stage! Suddenly, the hall was empty, the stage was empty, and Lakis came out and motioned for me to get up too. There was a curtain in the background and a movie was playing. He took me behind a curtain, and there was another huge curtain and on it, in a small frame, a picture of Ellie Lampeti was projected, like a TV, so very beautiful that tears welled up from her beauty. I asked him to take a picture of her to get this image. We did, but our photo came out blurry and blurry no matter how hard we tried. I wake up and Aspa tells me that Lakis has died.

My deepest condolences to his family. In Argyris, in Yvonne. Our Lakis is leaving.

“Our scythe angels have taken him.”