Four films, four journeys

Local films are included in this year’s annual Cyprus Film Days festival, opening on Friday. THEO PANAYIDES speaks to the people behind them

We’re surrounded by a glut of moving images. Eight thousand shows were released on TV and streaming in 2020-21, not counting all the ones renewed from previous years. In the 10 seconds it took you to read that sentence, 80 new hours of video were uploaded to YouTube. You’d think making films would be simple enough, in the midst of such (over-)abundance – yet in fact it remains extremely difficult, especially in a country with a small, precarious industry like Cyprus.

Cyprus Film Days, the year’s premier cinematic event, running from Friday in Nicosia and Limassol, is an international film festival – but it also has a Cypriot Films Competition section, this year comprised of four movies: Patchwork (also the festival’s opening film), directed by Petros Charalambous from a screenplay by Janine Teerling; The Rose Valley, written and directed by Christophoros Roditis; The Man With the Answers, written and directed by Stelios Kammitsis; and .dog, written and directed by Yianna Americanou. Each one represents a small miracle, a journey of many years and many obstacles – including Covid – distilled into 90 minutes of thoughtful storytelling.

All four are personal, of course, made because someone (a person, not a Netflix-type corporation) wanted to tell this particular story. Americanou based .dog, the tale of a troubled adolescent reunited with his previously absent father, on the socially deprived teens she encountered during three years as a volunteer at a local hostel for asylum seekers and boys from broken families. The script for Patchwork – a drama of a woman whose suppressed childhood trauma informs her own experience of motherhood – was inspired by Teerling’s own life “and those of the women around her,” according to the director, as well as his own ambition to make a character study about a complex, inter-generational female relationship.

The initial idea might be personal – but the actual process, as already mentioned, is invariably long and gruelling. The journey began “seven or eight years ago, at a series of scriptwriting seminars,” recalls Kammitsis, describing The Man With the Answers – relating the burgeoning friendship between two young men, a Greek former diving champion and a free-spirited German – as a story of “finding yourself in the other”. Roditis, too, first submitted his idea to the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture (the main source of funding in Cyprus) way back in 2016.

The Rose Valley, another tale of a relationship between two young people – described by Roditis as a film about “the freedom to dream beyond the conventional life dictated by the system” – is the only actual premiere among the four titles, the others having already played at other festivals.

Patchwork’s previous screenings include a slot at Karlovy Vary, in the ‘East of West’ section, while both Man and .dog won awards in the ‘Meet the Neighbours’ competition at last year’s Thessaloniki. All three are actually co-productions with other countries – another massive part of the journey being to find production companies across the EU (Cyprus alone is too small). Patchwork, for instance, started life in 2018 – though the script was written even earlier – “thanks to a meeting between the AMP Filmworks team and Slovenian Producer Ales Pavlin at Connecting Cottbus,” says Charalambous, “shortly followed by a meeting with Israeli producer Michael Rozenbaum at Mannheim Meeting Place”. It’s easy to forget, in the age of YouTube, just how much co-ordination and wheeling and dealing goes into making movies.

And then there’s Covid, adding yet another hurdle. The Rose Valley, in particular, ran headfirst into the pandemic, since the shoot was due to take place in March 2020 (nearly four years after the idea was first submitted). “The difficulty came unexpectedly in the fourth week of shooting, when the first lockdown happened,” recalls Roditis. “Just as we’d all settled into our rhythm and the shoot was going great, we had to stop – and the movie got transformed, from one day to the next, from a ‘romantic film’ into a ‘pandemic film’.” They picked up again two months later, the crew’s camaraderie reinforced, if anything, by what was going on in the world: their “love and support” was immense, says Roditis, thanking his collaborators for their heart – and art – in the face of all these challenges.

Challenges come in many forms. Patchwork and .dog, for instance, both involve directors taking on a protagonist of the opposite gender, indeed Americanou explicitly describes her film as “a male-mythology drama seen through the female gaze. This is a film about toxic masculinity, and it was always my intention to bring a more feminine perspective”. Artistic challenges should ideally be front and centre, of course – yet they’re often eclipsed by the sheer logistical feat of trying to create another world, and marshalling dozens of people in order to do so.

Is this something we can do successfully in Cyprus? Or are we just too small? “I don’t like to judge or compare,” says Kammitsis, as regards the current state of local cinema. “Everyone makes their own films in their own time, with their own difficulties. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s difficult for everyone.”

There’s one final difficulty, the cherry on the cake: the aforementioned fact that we’re surrounded by a glut of images – so, unless you’re very lucky or extremely good at marketing, most of these journeys are likely to end with films being underseen, despite being made over so many years and with so many sacrifices. (Though the upside is that it’s now much easier to sell your project; .dog, for instance, is about to sign with a big international video-on-demand platform.) Every opportunity should be taken to watch these movies – especially on the big screen – despite the temptations of YouTube and streaming. Cue Cyprus Film Days.

All films shown with English subtitles. For the full programme of events at Cyprus Film Days visit www.cyprusfilmdays.com