OLYMPIC GAMES
On Sunday, April 3, within the framework of the 7th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the directors Angelike Contis, director of “Olympic Diaries” and Antonis Rellas, director of “Aegean Waves” gave a press conference. These two films belong to the special section of the 7th Documentary Festival called “Olympic Games”, that features films that record moments and people that participated in the largest athletic event of last summer.
Antonis Rellas, who directed, produced and wrote the documentary “Aegean Waves” spoke first. Antonis Rellas began recording with his camera the effort of five Paralympic athletes, one year before the Olympic Games, to cross by swimming, the distance between Sounion and Milos, in order to contribute in this way to the promotion of the Paralympic Games. “However, the specific people also wanted to get a different message across about handicapped athletes and handicapped people in general”, Antonis Rellas characteristically stressed, and continued: “I followed the mission from Sounion to Milos, a distance greater than 150 klm, which was crossed by five handicapped athletes and two able bodied ones. Reaching Milos I felt how important this material that I had in my hands was. I decided to go a little further and I followed these five people right up to the Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games, I recorded their daily lives, their training, I interviewed them, I followed them until their great moment, until the finals. This is how this documentary was created. Being a handicapped person myself, when I learned of this project I believed that this was a very good opportunity to reverse the myth about the misfortune of handicapped persons that exists in our country and in western civilization in general, which considers handicapped people a priori unhappy, cursed etc".
"Therefore this documentary was a very good opportunity to speak with proof, with documents, mainly about handicapped people but also handicapped athletes because essentially they are no different from able bodied athletes since they compete in exactly the same way, they train the same way. “ Antonis Rellas recorded in his film the five different feelings which he himself personally experienced, when he found himself in the position of a handicapped person: “Disappointment at first, then facing things, then a struggle – struggle with the waves in the documentary, struggle with ordinary life on a daily basis, then participation and the participants, that is those people who embrace you and accept you for what you are and not for what you don’t have, and finally closure.” Antonis Rellas concluded with a phrase from his film “Love is life, it is never cancelled, and is beautiful no matter what”.
Then Angelike Contis, creator of the film “Olympic Diaries” took the floor and congratulated Antonis Rellas for his exceptional work on the documentary “Aegean Waves”. Speaking about her own film, she said that she felt the need to create this documentary while she was in Athens during the great event of the Olympic Games. “I decided to take the camera and show what was going on in Athens, the city and the Games, through the eyes and the everyday lives of three people who lived and worked in the city. My heroes were Alexia Amvrazi, a journalist for the foreign language radio station of the municipality of Athens, Athens International Radio (104.4), my father Vassilios Kontis, a Greek American who came to work as a volunteer for the Olympic Games, and Stavros Melissinos, who had a little restaurant in Psirri where all the foreigners who were searching for something authentically Greek, something one doesn’t find easily in Olympic Athens, would gather” Angelike Kontis said, speaking of her film. The creator concluded by saying that through these two documentaries, “Olympic Diaries” and “Aegean Waves” the question is posed of what will remain in Greece of the huge investment that was made for the Athens Olympic and Paralympic Games.
