A DOCUMENTARY

The literal title of this film by Nikos Koutelidakis, loaded as it is with layers of irony and secondary meaning, serves as an early inkling of what will become overtly apparent right from its opening shots. The camera contemplates the abandoned mansions in the town of Galaxidi, focusing first on the damage done by wear and tear to their exteriors, and then on their vacant interior spaces that once were filled with a human hustle and bustle. The storied past of this place, including details that evoke its former commercial shipping glory, becomes mired inside Galaxidi’s listing around that time as a protected traditional settlement, one that tries to shake off the quaint, nostalgic air imposed upon it by a pivotal decade at its dawn, only to become trapped once more within the guise of the vintage tourist attraction it remains to this day. Without warning, and much as the past intrudes on the present (or much as the imaginary is delineated by the real), Koutelidakis dedicates a ceremony to Galaxidi, a rite of valediction or perhaps of welcome – it makes no difference which. It is the revival of a carnival custom that sweeps you off into a convulsive death ritual before you even get the chance to acclimatize yourself to its beat, setting the tenor of a Dionysian requiem that does not get to complete its melancholy cycle before it folds within it “a documentary” that might well pertain to every place in Greece that watched on as time effaced its defining characteristics, the way rain washes off the paint that adorns the human order, as if in an attempt to reveal its true nature.