OLYMPIA
ΟΛΥΜΠΙΑ
Documentary · 45′ · 2015
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Synopsis
Olympia, 33 years old and already three months pregnant, learns that she has lung cancer — a rare and especially severe medical case. After much hesitation and difficulty, it is decided to continue the pregnancy, and a perfectly healthy baby, Panagiotis, is born.
Four months after the birth, as the disease races ahead, at the initiative of her doctor, Iakovos Antzel, we spend four days close to Olympia and her family, recording what we could, and what the circumstances allowed.
The film follows these days not as a chronicle of illness, but as an experience of life, relationships and endurance, within the close family circle.
Film credits
- Genre
- Documentary
- Running time
- 45′
- Year
- 2015
- Direction – Screenplay – Editing – Sound recording
- Stavros Psillakis
- Cinematography
- Thekla Malamou
- Production
- Stavros Psillakis
- Shooting locations
- Greece (Menemeni, Thessaloniki), 9–12 January 2014
Awards
- Audience Award, 17th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (2015)
Director’s note
After “METAXA listening to time,” OLYMPIA. Formally, both films deal with people afflicted by cancer. In substance, however, their subject is death — the fear of death, and my own fear of death.
If the first film spoke wordlessly and underground about “…the Greeks who made the fear of death the passion of life” (a line by Embirikos which a friend, on seeing the film, very aptly recalled), then what does OLYMPIA speak about?
Olympia, 33 years old and three months pregnant, learns she has lung cancer. In the end she gives birth to a perfectly healthy baby, Panagiotis. Four months after the birth, as the disease races ahead, at the initiative of her doctor, Iakovos Antzel, we spend four days close to Olympia and her family, recording what we could and what the circumstances allowed.
Olympia wanted to become a hairdresser, studied dressmaking, and ended up a pastry chef. She created things: sweets, gatherings, moments.
“I will keep this baby no matter what,” she said. And she kept him. Now she is trying to live. Because she has Panagiotis. Life. And, as she herself says, “life is very beautiful.”
What does OLYMPIA speak about? I still cannot answer. Despite the warmth and sweetness that Olympia and her family generously gave us during these four days, perhaps — without moralizing — it speaks about the most essential things of a human being: those that only silence can express.
Everything was very difficult. Perhaps the hardest thing I have shot to date. Indeed, her doctor admits something similar, when a sob interrupts him.
Full transcript
Photographs
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