The screening of the films Gazoros Serron & Prespes by Takis Hatzopoulos took place on Saturday March 15th at Olympion theater, in terms of universal accessibility, within the framework of the 27th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. This year’s Festival carries on with commitment to the universally accessible screenings thanks to the valuable support of Alpha Bank, the Accessibility Sponsor of the Festival, within the framework of the "Cinema for All" program. For the second consecutive edition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, the Alpha Bank Accessibility Award of €3,000 will be awarded, either to a personality or to a film that highlights accessibility issues in the arts.
The documentary Gazoros Serron (1974) was awarded the Best Production Award at the 15th Thessaloniki International Film Festival and presents us with the authentic physiognomy of the Greek countryside, whereas the short documentary Prespes (1966) was awarded at the 7th Greek Film Festival as the Best Short Documentary Film. The above films were screened with audio description [AD: Audio Description] for the blind and visually impaired and with subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing [SDH: Subtitles for the Deaf or hard of Hearing], both in physical spaces and in their online screenings.
The screening was prefaced by the partner of the international program, Yiannis Palavos, who, after thanking the audience, made a brief presentation of the tribute Geography of the Gaze: Off-plan Greece (1950-2000), which includes both award-winning documentaries, but also in the work of documentarian Takis Hatzopoulos: "He is a creator who left his own mark on Greek documentary and this is not a cliché. Unfortunately, he is not as well known as he deserves to be and as his overall work merited. Today two of his great films are going to be screened, the seldom seen Prespes (1966), a short melancholic elegiac poem about life in the tripoint, which presents a geographical as well as emotional border. We are also screening the much better known film Gazoros Serron (1974), a film that takes us to Serres for a Chekhov portrait of provincial life." He then gave the floor to Ilias Giannakakis, director and close partner of Takis Hatzopoulos in the tv cultural show Paraskinio (Background). Teta Papadopoulou, wife and partner of Takis Hatzopoulos, was also present at the screening.
Ilias Giannakakis thanked the audience, the Festival for hosting the event, and the ERT (Greek Radio Television) Archive Directorate for digitizing the films. He also thanked the curators of the tribute, the Head of the Greek Program of the Festival Eleni Androutsopoulou, the film critic Manolis Kranakis and Yiannis Palavos. "This afternoon is dedicated to Takis Hatzopoulos, who is known mainly from the Paraskinio (Background). Together with Lakis Papastathis, they created the greatest school in Greek documentary, interacting between cinema and television and creating a miracle that lasted for 40 years. Prespes (1966) is the first attempt of Takis Hatzopoulos as a director. It is a lyrical documentary, deeply influenced by his relationship with Takis Kanellopoulos. In this film, Takis Hatzopoulos presents for the first time what will mark him until the end of his career: another Greece, specifically the forgotten Greece. In 1971, together with Lakis Papastathis, Takis Hatzopoulos funded Cinetic, the company behind Paraskinio, while in 1973 he decides to make a feature documentary about his birthplace: Gazoros, Serron (1974) where we also observe his creative command, always with an eye on forgotten Greece," Ilias Giannakakis noted. He also added that many residents of the region were present in the theater, Paris Hatzopoulos included, the nephew of the late director, who participated in the documentary at the age of three.
"Gazoros Serrοn is an extremely daring documentary, a return to the homeland and its people. It does not present an embellished portrait of his birthplace, but instead shows abandonment, migration, poverty and hardship. He makes a film that lacks the lyricism of Prespes, an existential and political film, shot in the last years of the dictatorship. When Takis Hatzopoulos was making the film, he didn’t know that it would be screened after the collapse of the regime, in a democratic and free Greece. In other words, he may very well have found himself in the eye of the storm. The film was screened at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, winning the Grand Prize. It ist a masterpiece by a great cinematographer, shot with a 16mm camera and just two partners. Since then, Takis Hatzopoulos has been involved with Paraskinio, both as a producer and as a director, with great success. He did not direct any other documentary. He wanted to direct a fiction film but he did not get the chance. He achieved great success in the 80s, when he collaborated with Teta Papadopoulou, an important figure for Paraskinio. Together they produced masterpieces that presented faces from a forgotten Greece, without mourning and throwing stones, but always with dignity. Takis Hatzopoulos was a man who chose to fly under the radar and never sought to be in the limelight of attention. He was a special case of a man and deserves to be discovered by those who do not know him", Ilias Giannakakis concluded. Afterwards, the screening of the two documentaries followed.
Gazoros Serron, Takis Hatzopoulos, 1974, 77 ́
In 1974, shortly before launching the legendary Paraskinio [Backstage] along with Lakis Papastathis, which was to define a new era in Greek TV documentary, Takis Ηatzopoulos visited Gazoros, a small village of tobacco workers in Serres, with “two people, a 16mm camera and a tape recorder.” He was to record more than the everyday life of a place marked by the struggle of making a daily wage, the heartache of emigration, and the ground zero of a whole country in violent transformation. True to his principles that “there is no cinema outside the class struggle” and that “documentary is created, reconstituted, composed in the editing room,” he separates the villagers’ narratives (of which the film exclusively consists) from the images of their daily lives, liberating an incalculable amount of authenticity based on human toil, survival, and the dream of a better life. While it feels as though he is preserving the historical memory of the place, essentially letting the village tell its own story, Hatzopoulos also engages in a timely political commentary on this very need, disrupting the established anthropogeography of the Greek countryside and the concept of poetry as it sneaks into the documentation. The microcosm of Gazoros becomes Greece in miniature, his documentary forming a testimony that is both historical and timeless. Best Production Award, 15th Greek Film Festival, 1974.
Prespes, Takis Hatzopoulos, 1966, 14 ́
“A corner of Greece. Prespes.” So begins the short documentary that Takis Hatzopoulos shot in 1966, the first major act of a journey that would inevitably lead him to Gazoros Serron in 1974 and from there to his time on the TV documentary series Paraskinio, an inexhaustible hothouse of films and filmmaking talent. Hatzopoulos chronicles this one corner of Greece, where a lake divides people into nationalities, in 14 minutes, with obvious echoes not only of the documentation but also of the fiction of Takis Kanellopoulos as it is captured in the black and white photography of Syrakos Danalis, the music of Kostas Mylonas, and the voice-over of Angelos Antonopoulos. The stultifying daily routine, the unvarying days following one after the other, the border that ultimately separates those who remember and those who wait, the hardest hour of the day – nightfall – a circle of life without “the possibility of a surprise,” a “simple world” that says good morning in three languages, becomes through Hatzopoulos’ gaze a small, melancholy ode on the beauty and heartache of a place. It is also a biting commentary on the wider Greece that would dismiss concepts such as tolerance, coexistence, and simplicity, eventually crossing the border and destroying the sacred balance between the insignificant and the significant that is respected only by those who have learned to look at God from the measure of a man.
