DEBT

The film Debt does not attempt a biography defined by roles or social identities. Alekos is treated as a literary “hero,” approached as a vessel of experience — a man who speaks from within, without explaining and without apologizing.

The directorial choice is deliberately restrictive. From his life we keep only two chapters. Not because the rest lack value, but because our approach does not need them.

The first chapter is Alekos's own account of his illness. Not as a medical event or a narrative of struggle, but as an inner experience: how cancer is lived, how it is inscribed in time, in memory, in the body.

The second chapter comprises our four journeys to Pyrsogianni. They are not treated as separate events, but as a single cinematic field. We are not interested in their occasion nor in the village itself as a subject. The place functions as a space of experience, not as a theme.

The camera dwells on individual moments: on gatherings at the coffee houses and stories that begin with no aim, on excursions and meetings in the surrounding villages, on the New Year's Eve feast, where the clarinet, the drink and the collective communion form an informal community. None of this is explained or commented upon.

In between, we hear extracts from our “hero's” personal diaries and writings, narrated off-screen by an actor, functioning as Alekos's inner monologue. Where absolutely necessary, brief factual texts are inserted, narrated by the director.

Debt is not interested in the outcome of the illness. It does not agonize for answers. It dwells in the time as it is lived, before any conclusion. It tries to let a man be heard without becoming an example, and to record an experience without turning it into a narrative.

Debt concerns those moments of life when, without our knowing it, we flirt with Mortality — moments of fullness and generosity that are etched indelibly within us and shape us, regardless of each person's biological course.