‘Volta,’ a stroll through Athens, seeks crowdfunding
Filmmaker Stella Kyriakopoulos is running a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter forum for a short film that will be shot in Greece in late September, with a September 24 deadline for donations to get the project off the ground.
“Volta” (Stroll) follows a mother and her 5-year-old daughter as they travel through the Greek capital, mapping the changing neighborhoods from the northern suburbs to the center of Athens.
“I used to take the same journey the characters will take in the film to get to school every day with my little brother,” Kyriakopoulos says in her online presentation for the project.
“‘Volta’ is my reaction to coming back to Athens last winter, making the same journey again and seeing all the changes around me. I ended up doing most of my writing on these journeys around the city and everything that’s in the film is based on things I saw and conversations I had on them,” she explains.
A graduate of the MFA Film program at New York University, Kyriakopoulos is also a recipient of the Attica Tradition Foundation Scholarship. She studied film and media at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts.
She is currently an MFA candidate at Tisch School of the Arts in New York and “Volta” is her thesis film.
“Right now there are people in Greece watching the place that made them and the dreams and hopes they had in this place disintegrate. They are still taking the same bus, wondering what to have for dinner, buying toilet paper, making difficult decisions, simmering, waiting, adjusting,” Kyriakopoulos says of the project. “Things they never imagined that they would be able to do, decisions they never thought they would have to make, become commonplace, a way of life. Greeks abroad also experience this, as plans to return are abandoned, families divided. ‘Volta’ is about these people and these things, and it is for them.”
To date, the project has reached $11,260 of its $25,000 goal. To donate or learn more about the film, log on to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/volta/volta-a-short-film.
