FAREWELL

The film “Farewell — the memory of the land” was born fifteen years after the shooting of the documentary “There Was No Other Way.” That film had yielded around seventy hours of rich, multifaceted footage, much of which was left out, as often happens in documentary, where editing has its own merciless economy.

Among the material not used, the footage of Giannis Lionakis in the caves of Apokoronas held a special place. His guided tour through the places of his years in hiding — a farewell journey, as it turned out, through the space that had largely shaped his life — remained within me as unfinished business. Not, however, as a continuation or supplement to the earlier film.

The catalyst for my return to this material, and at the same time the perspective through which I would approach it, was a passage by Chris Marker from the documentary “If I Had Four Camels” (1966): “…thousands of fighters around the world had given all they had for a cause which, as they believed, as they said, was greater than themselves, but which in the end proved that its greatness was themselves.”

I noted that passage down immediately. It was the light that led me back to Giannis and to the caves, and gave me the perspective from which I could finally approach this material. I do not believe he himself would have agreed with this formulation — not only out of modesty, but because faith in their cause was, for them, everything. And yet I do not feel I am overstepping. This is how Giannis shone within me. And this is how I could finally speak of him.

When I speak of “the memory of the land,” I do not mean geography or history in the narrow sense. I mean a place where the animate and the inanimate coexist and act as equals: people, earth, caves, the natural environment. As in folk song, the land participates in the action, remembers and repeats. It is not a setting, but a collective subject of experience and of repeated moral action.

In this sense, the film could be seen as a Cretan epic — not of heroes, but of a land.