Listening to a silent god cry
I began my journey down the Kifissos about six years ago in order to write an article. On a cold, bright day in February I set off looking for the restless, vandalized body of a forgotten god. I followed it to the sea, listening to its silences and its breath. I gave myself up to the peace of its waters where they flow from its source and where the few remaining traces of its beauty still lie. I felt its sadness, its pain and its crazed desire to flow ever onward. I felt rage at the abuse, the looting, the unbridled violation of the river and its present fate. I saw the clash between man and his environment in the attempt to further a concept of growth and progress. I witnessed the whole unnatural process of transforming it into a highway right in the middle of a stifling city. I was filled with silent joy every time its own rage spilled over, dragging with it the works of the disrespectful with divine majesty. I wrote my article about its twinned existence, as it spreads over the natural and built environment. I wrote about the crazed lives of the people who live beside it, but was never published. Yet my own contact with the river gave birth to a film about the provisional hibernation of the Kifissos. Dionysia Kopana’s film «Kifissos, a God’s Awakening» was shown at the 8th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and the Ecofilms – Rhodes International Films and Visual Arts Festival.
