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Mourning Rock
Ilias Monacholias in his cafe vis a vis the archaeological site in Eleusis
Medellin 20 June 2016
Hello to everybody
My name is Ilias Monacholias and I feel so proud to be with you, among a lot of people that appreciate poetry and among poets from 5 continents.
And I am going to present, in brief, the great film “Mourning Rock”, a film for Eleusis.
When introducing the movie and its director Filippos Koutsaftis in 2013 in Louvre, the French philosopher and art critic Georges Didi – Huberman said:
“Why this movie? Because we rarely see a cinema that gets attached to the earth’s depths with such sensitivity and obsession. It took 12 years of irregular, yet consistent shooting in the archaeological site of Eleusis to conceive what remains from the ancient mysteries, from buried cities and buried lives.
Filippos Koutsaftis understands cinema as an art of those who have survived, therefore as archaeology in a full sense. But archaeology is also a battlefield and not only a field of excavations. The director was right enough to see that the survivors are in constant war with memory – the petrol factories, the bitumen on the ancient Sacred Road. The survivors are fighting to give birth to something new, in the same way that this old man wonders around the ancient rocks and takes care of them like a father his wounded children. And all these in a series of so simple images and so contemplative thoughts that make this movie one and sole big poem.”
For all of us, who were born, grew up and live in Eleusis, the film "Mourning Rock" is both a maternal caress and a stab in our heart.
Maternal caress is because that it faces our town and its people with great tenderness, so that really touches the viewer. Stab in the heart is because it reminds us that we are seriously responsible for some issues and we often forget them.
The director Philippos Koutsaftis spent more than 10 years, filming and living the images of our town and the words of its people. The result? To chart our memory.
What will be our future if we do not have memory? This should be our question to ourselves at the end of the film.
Please enjoy the film, subtitled in Spanish for this Festival, and think. Think of my small town with the very important history.
The stone that does not smile - documentary by Filippos Koutsaftis
This excellent documentary about Elefsina / Eleusis is called in the Greek language 'Agelastos Petra' made by Filippos Koutsaftis.
Agelastos petra (2000) - IMDb
www.imdb.com/title/tt0268898/
Another translation of the title can be "the mourning stone". The myth has it that Demeter sat on this stone and was sad as her daughter had disappeared into Hades or Hell. Fortunately she reappeared in spring time. It marks the connection of the earth to the four seasons, but this myth reminds as well of Odysseus who goes down into Hades and there meets most of his friends with whom he had fought in Troy. Wondering why they ended up in Hades, they all tell him that they are here because their wives were unfaithful. Only Penelope was the exception, yet this too has a counter story in the form of a poem by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke about Penelope resisting the friars with her own tricks only women know too well how to deploy in order to fool the men. Having said that, the question is what distinguishes myths from certain rumours or chilling stories which can chill the bones and thicken the blood when told to an innocent audience?
It is a documentary about contemporary industrial culture and traces of history in this ancient site and at the same time a heavy industrialised city. It was shoot over a stretch of ten years. Such observations of daily life over the stretch of ten years allow a working with change. How people are affected when major and minor changes occur in their immediate surroundings and in the relationship of the city not only to Athens, but to the sea. While they would be able to swim in their childhood days, the construction of factories, in particular the cement producing one, sabotages all dreams of having free access to nature and to the sea. Altough it is a basic cultural premise in Greece that everyone should have free access to the sea, the cement factory sealed off all access to the sea.
To trace pain, this is more than mere anguish to be shouted out into the night sky. What the documentary shows above all are the stories told by the faces of the people who live there.
More about this writer and film director, see
http://www.arkadiaxaire.com/the-director.html
A second documentary by Filippos Koutsaftis is called "Hail Arcadia", and likewise is about the myths of a special place. It had after its premiere at the 18th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival where it was awarded by FIPRESCI for best film. Its first screening took place at the 21 International Cinema Festival of Athens will come to Athens and Thessaloniki theatres on October 15, 2015
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