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Nikos Karouzos – Poems on the tape recorder
Production, distribution, promotion
Overview
101′
2020
- Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
Best Greek Newcomer Award - Balcan Nordic Film Festival, Finland
Editing Award - Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht, Germany
Special Mention - Festival International Signes de Nuit, France
Special Mention - Docs on Sale International Documentary Festival Amsterdam
Left-wing and Christian, hermit and an alcoholic, damned poet Nikos Karouzos is the central figure of this essay film about a documentary. Through the Athenian urban landscape, the editing room, the prison island of Makronissos, Stockholm and Kronstadt, we follow a frustrated researcher in his journey in time, to restore the collective memory of Greece’s most underrated poet and his tumultuous times through pictures, celluloid and testimonies. A story about life and death, about Greece’s troubled post-war history, and about the advent of Spring.
About
“We are dealing with a film, here, with the views of its creators about and on poetry, about and on our present times, views that have only as a reference Nikos Karouzos, his poetry and his time. And that’s really important. It is something new. I will put it differently: I don’t want to know w h o Karouzos is but w h y Karouzos is what he is.” Christos Skyllakos – toperiodiko.gr
Empty Square is the producer of the film Nikos Karouzos: poems on the tape recorder. The project has been co-produced by GFC (Greek Film Center) and ERT (Hellenic Broadcast Television) and co-founded by Faliro House productions.
Credits
Starring: Dimitris Katalifos
Director: Yannis Karpouzis
Screenplay: Andreas Vakalios, Ilias Liatsopoulos
Music: Cleon Antoniou, Giannis Haroulis, Lefteris Andriotis
Editor: Leonidas Papafotiou
Research: Ilias Liatsopoulos
Director of Photography: Yannis Karpouzis, Yannis Kanakis
Translations: Costas Koutsikouris
Sound design: Kostas Fylaktidis, 17 Poisoned Englishmen
Mixing: Kostas Fylaktidis
Colour grading: Grigoris Arvanitis / Authorwave
Festivals and sales: Lina Samoili
Produced by: Yannis Karpouzis, Empty Square, ERT, GFC
Poem
Romantic Epilogue
Don’t read me if you haven’t
attended the funerals of strangers
or at least memorial services.
If you haven’t
divined the strength
that makes love
the rival of death.
If you haven’t flown a kite on Clean Monday
without monkeying with it.
pulling on the string continually.
If you don’t know if Nostradamus ever
sniffed flowers.
If you haven’t been at least once
to the Deposition from the Cross.
If you don’t know any past perfect.
If you don’t love animals
and, especially, squirrels.
If you don’t hear thunder with pleasure,
wherever you are.
If you don’t know that the handsome Modigliani
drunk at three in the morning,
pounded furiously on a friend’s door
looking for Villon’s poems
and began to read for hours out loud
disturbing the Universe.
If you call nature our mother and not our aunt.
If you don’t joyously drink the innocent water.
If you don’t understand the Flowering Era
is the one you’re living in.
BEWARE
WET PAINT.
Don’t read me
if
you are
right.
Don’t read me if
you haven’t quarrelled with the body . . .
Time I was going,
I have no more breath.
Translation: Philip Ramp
Publisher: First published on PIW
