THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY
ΑΛΛΟΣ ΔΡΟΜΟΣ ΔΕΝ ΥΠΗΡΧΕ
Feature-length documentary · 87′ · 2009
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Synopsis
In Crete, a unit of the Democratic Army remained active even after the Civil War had ended in the rest of Greece. Six men and two women, outlaws with bounties on their heads, hid for around fourteen years in the Chania Prefecture, keeping the illegal organizations alive. In 1962, six of them fled via Italy to Tashkent. Three are alive today, and are the central figures of the film.
The film records their endurance, and, alongside it, the self-sacrifice of the people who protected them for years. The “protagonists” and the “unseen” of this story — equally luminous and equally hard to find — beyond ideologies, embody something very important: a deep devotion to the human being and to human dignity. This is the film's subject…
Film credits
- Genre
- Feature-length documentary
- Running time
- 87′
- Year
- 2009
- Direction – Screenplay
- Stavros Psillakis
- Original idea & collaboration on research and screenplay
- Matthaios Frantzeskakis
- Cinematography
- Christos Asimakopoulos
- Special shots – Additional filming
- Dimitris Xenakis, Giorgos Pantelakis, Stelios Apostolopoulos
- Editing
- Giorgos Triantafyllou
- Sound recording
- Anastasis Efentakis
- Original music – Mixing & sound studios
- Vangelis Fampas, “Massive Productions”
- Text rendering
- Panos Kyparissis
- Production
- Greek Film Centre — Stavros Psillakis
- Shooting locations
- GREECE (Chania Prefecture) – southern ITALY (Lecce area), 2007
Awards
- 1st Documentary Award, Hellenic Film Academy (May 2010)
- 1st Award for Feature-Length Film, competition programme of the 3rd Chalkida Greek Documentary Festival (October 2009)
- Audience Award — 2nd Nicosia International Documentary Film Festival “Views of the World” (Cyprus, March 2009)
Director’s note
Taking its cue from the book of the same title, There Was No Other Way, by Nikos and Argyro Kokovli (two of the outlaws still alive today), the film explores the endurance of the shattered remnants of the Democratic Army in Western Crete, as well as the self-sacrifice of ordinary people who fed and hid them for years.
How and why did the “protagonists” bear such suffering, hunted by numerous and fanatical pursuers, living in caves, stables, cesspits and makeshift shelters?
And how and why did the “unseen,” the ordinary people, open not only their houses but their lives to receive the hunted, to hide them, feed them and help them?
The “protagonists” and the “unseen” of this story — equally luminous and equally hard to find — embody a struggle that, to endure such hardship, requires more than faith in an ideology, however noble it may be. It requires something much more: a deep devotion to the human being itself and to human dignity.
This struggle for dignity is also the subject of the documentary — a subject we attempted to sketch in coarse, hard lines, as befits the life and conditions those people lived through, and not as an “old, melodramatic story.”
Full transcript
Photographs
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