Painter ducks behind the camera
Cinema is painter Kyriakos Katzourakis’s latest, greatest love, but that does not mean the artist has turned his back on his canvases. Instead, he has found a way to make his two loves coexist, and his new film, «Sweet Memory,» will be playing in mainstream movie theaters as of March 9. The artist is also holding a show at the Ianos bookstore in central Athens, where he is exhibiting the storyboards (drawings of scenes) he crafted for the film. Katzourakis enjoys this part of the filmmaking process and his goal is to apply it to every new project. «There is a sense of time in all my work and the storyboards represent all the different moments in time,» he said. «I use the storyboards in order to shed light and to focus on what I feel are the most important moments in the film.» «Sweet Memory,» a Greek Film Center production, has already been screened at the 2005 Thessaloniki International Festival, where it was awarded for best set design (by Nikos Politis) and received the best supporting actress prize. It was also shown at the Montreal film festival and at Mexico’s FICCO in 2006. «As far as the film itself is concerned,» the filmmaker said, «I believe that it is a composition of bittersweet memories of my own personal past and the collective past of post-Civil War Greece.» Also having played the role of screenwriter, Katzourakis said that though he had written several versions of the film, by the time he finished editing he discovered that he had settled on his original script. The storyboards, he said, focus more on the first part of the film. Inspired by Paul Genet’s «Four Hours in Chatila,» the director admitted to «being jealous that a poet could shed so much light on a political event. I thought that I, as a ‘poet,’ could throw some light on other political moments. That was how I invented the young lead character, and I look at the city through his eyes.» «Sweet Memory,» starring Katia Gerou, Ekavi Douma, Maria Zorba and Nikos Karathanos, tracks Irina’s return to Greece from Russia after 25 years and her attempts to locate her brother.
