ALUMINIUM OF GREECE

Documenting the entire cycle of aluminium production, from bauxite extraction to final processing, and capturing the construction of the industrial infrastructure at Aspropyrgos, Boeotia, in 1960, Roussos Koundouros delivers Aluminium of Greece – one of the first industrial documentaries in Greek cinema, a striking testament to his scientific precision and cinematic vision in recording the radical transformation of the Greek landscape. With no voice-over narration, but guided by pioneering electronic score, Koundouros doesn’t simply depict the before and after of an industrial process. In full harmony with his artistic ethos – and almost in defiance of the film’s corporate commission by “Aluminium of Greece” – he challenges the limits of cinematic poetry, using his lens to uncover unexpected beauty, rhythm, intensity, and even a quiet melancholy in the mechanization of progress. In what might have been a dry technical record, he finds sacredness in steel, movement in machinery, and an eerie poetry in progress itself, revealing the human and environmental stakes of industrialization as it reshapes both landscapes and lives.