FOR NO REASON
encounters with Giorgos Maniatis
ΓΙΑ ΧΩΡΙΣ ΛΟΓΟΥΣ
Documentary · 2019
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Synopsis
Giorgos Maniatis (1939–2018) — a Foreign Legionnaire in Algeria at 18, later a writer and musician — defined himself as a “public danger.”
FOR NO REASON is not a biography. It seeks the adventure of his soul: a consciousness in constant vigilance, incendiary and self-consuming.
A. Ziras, writing about Maniatis on the occasion of the 1990 re-publication of Legion, speaks of a constant quest to overstep limits, and of a “paroxysm of ceaseless movement” that becomes the very protagonist of the work. This same aura runs through the recorded material of our meetings, and is the final sensation the film pursues.
“Whoever changes life, changes life,” he tells us.
Film credits
- Genre
- Documentary
- Year
- 2019
- Trilogy
- ODES TO EXISTENCE — 1. For No Reason
- Direction – Screenplay – Sound recording – Cinematography
- Stavros Psillakis
- Collaboration on idea and research
- Aimilios Kaliakatsos
- Editing
- Spyros Kokkas
- Paintings
- Michalis Manousakis
- Mixing & sound studios
- Vangelis Fampas, “Massive Productions”
- Image post-production – Production
- 2|35 / Two Thirty Five
- Production
- © 2019 Stavros Psillakis — Two Thirty Five
- Support
- Greek Film Centre
Awards
- 2nd Award for Feature-Length Film, competition programme of the 13th Chalkida Greek Documentary Festival (November 2019)
- Nominated for the IRIS Award for Best Feature Documentary, Hellenic Film Academy (IRIS Awards 2020)
Director’s note
“Whoever changes life, changes life” (G. Maniatis)
FOR NO REASON is not a portrait-biography of Giorgos Maniatis.
Even if he had lived and we had continued filming, it would not have been.
From the start, I was interested only in his own words and his own work. Not third-party testimony, not external commentary, not biographical documentation. The usual form of the cinematic portrait could not contain this case.
Our meetings — filmed and unfilmed — gradually built a field of experience: a discourse in constant vigilance, moving at the edges, seeking to overstep limits and the cost of doing so. The film follows this consciousness not as a life story, but as a continuous act.
After his sudden death, the material already recorded revealed its own self-sufficiency. Combined with archival documents and Maniatis's own writings, the film found its form: not as a forced reconstruction, but as a complete work.
FOR NO REASON attempts to record the adventure of a soul that does not rest, that does not apologize, and that does not seek reconciliation.
A discourse that insists on moving.
It closes, as Maniatis's own work does, with the knowledge that creation is an act of renunciation and withdrawal. Not spectacle. Act.
Full transcript
Photographs
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