OLYMPIA

Stavros Psillakis: “Making a documentary film is an adoption”

A man of rare courtesy and modesty and, at the same time, one of the most distinguished exponents of human-centred documentary in Greece, Stavros Psillakis is, moreover, a torrential, if softly spoken, conversationalist, with a piercing, sparkling gaze. We met recently in Exarchia, on the occasion of the screening of his documentary Olympia, whose central “protagonist” is Olympia, a 33-year-old pregnant woman with cancer. After its national premiere at this year's 17th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, where it won the Audience Award, the documentary is being screened as part of the 21st Athens International Film Festival – Opening Nights (Monday 28 September 2015, Greek Film Archive, 19:00).

Why do people play such a central role in all your work?

In my films I usually do nothing more and nothing less than what I do in my life: what I am searching for and whom I spend my time with. I am not someone who experiences the course of events in a historical dimension, as the official History they teach us. Yes, I read and keep myself informed, but I am far more interested in people themselves and in human stories, and it is in rubbing shoulders with people that the best and the worst feelings may come out of me. It isn't that I start from some great faith in and esteem for the human race – if anything, I would say the opposite is true. I try to find “nuggets” of people and to prod certain situations in which people, through their very presence, vindicate the very fact of life. We did not come into this world as slaves, nor to become parts of a great economic and productive system. If dreams, magic and the absurd don't enter our lives, everything else seems meagre. Given the personal way I experience life, then, people interest me enormously. So I try to discover why they embark on the adventures they embark on, and why some of them, by choice or by circumstance, so often end up walking along the edge of certain situations. I don't accuse anyone, nor am I a prosecutor or someone who knows what is good and what must be done in the world. I know nothing, and as the years go by I have almost no certainties at all.

When I made the film “The Man Who Disturbed the Universe” ...

…Which I watched last night, to refresh my memory of it.

...lovely people took part in it and it turned out to be a lovely film – I can say so myself now that 17–18 years have passed, since it is as if someone else had made it. In this film I wasn't starting from an activist or a charitable impulse. Those things are by-products. I was starting from my anxiety as a human being to discover what madness is. It is by chance that they are inside and by chance that most of us are outside – nobody chose the bars of the psychiatric hospital. At the same time, this borderline state allows a person to live through many experiences unfiltered. Madness is something that shakes the foundations of Western civilisation. The patients of the psychiatric hospital brought out something very rich, which is an enormous lesson.

Was it from this inner need, to get to know people who “walk along the edge of certain situations”, that your encounters with your other “characters” came about as well?

Mostly they start from there. But here I have to confess another great truth to you, one that I am gradually coming to feel: every person has their own story and is interesting in their own way. Making a documentary film – because that is what I know how to do – is an adoption. All the people and incidents that may be included in a film existed, exist and will go on existing. At some point life's circumstances make you “bump” into them. It is as if someone has left a baby outside your door and it is up to you what you do with it: will you let it die, or will you adopt it? An “adoption” like that happens with the people who appear in my films too, and then the adventure begins. Above all, I want to put the person I am talking to at ease: from where they will sit to the conversation we will have, like two friends. So that they tell me their pain, their dream, their joy.

In “METAXA — listening to time” there is, I remember, a man, Vasilis Trifyllis, the one in the yellow T-shirt, who towards the end of the film starts talking about the masks each of us wears in life. It is doubtful whether this man had even finished primary school. He was a storeman at Elais and lived somewhere in Nikaia in a poor, working-class house, in an environment where religion was a strong presence, with a wife who looked after him but was also neurotically protective. At one point I ask him “what do you like, what gives you pleasure?”. And then another person starts to unfold, revealing such sensitivity, such dense and solid speech, that you wonder where it came from. A huge surprise. I am grateful to him.

The whole story of the documentary began with a doctor, Nikos Karvounis, who had fallen ill himself and appears in the film; it was he who suggested it to me. He also suggested most of the people in it, and one thing led to another.

How would you describe Olympia as a person?

“Olympia” is perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever filmed. Its story is connected to “METAXA”, because at its second screening in Thessaloniki (note: at the 14th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in 2012) there was a doctor in the audience, a lung specialist. He saw the film and two years later he happened to have this case; he was her doctor. He called me and offered to cover my expenses. So I went up to Thessaloniki, after he had first spoken to the family, and we visited them. A very sweet family, very hospitable and warm, and Olympia, more or less in the condition in which she appears in the documentary, a very sweet girl. But things are hard and heavy. As I was leaving, I said to the doctor “it's interesting, but I don't have the strength, I can't do this any more”, and then he turned and said to me: “But that's exactly why I called you”. He won me over.

About ten days later I went back with Thekla Malamou, a very capable and pleasant person, to do the cinematography. With no other crew, we stayed four days. We took in whatever we took in. It is a working-class family: the children of the extended family come and go, the grandfather is a musician who plays at village festivals, the mother is the child of migrants and has filled the house with icons, without in any way resembling a neurotic religious zealot. She believed in the way my father or my mother believed. In the same way that, whatever my personal beliefs, you might see me at the Epitaphios procession on Good Friday, or I might step into a little chapel to say a quick “hello”. And then there was Olympia. I don't know where she found the strength. Her condition was very critical; I knew she wouldn't last long. She herself had drawn enormous strength from the birth of the child. I have a scene where life and death coexist in a tight embrace. Death sits outside the door in his black coat, watching and telling you “I am the lord here”, and suddenly, while he waits for his prey, you have a person saying “I want to live, I love Panagiotis” – the baby who was born perfectly healthy – and all of this within a great embrace. I don't know what she believed inside, like others on the threshold of death, nor could I ask her.

Though it seems contradictory, documentaries such as “METAXA” or “Olympia” are lessons in life, humanity and dignity, even though they deal with decay and death.

That is life. But it is also your own fear of death, which is triggered when you come face to face with decay and death. I can't speak about how I deal with my own fear. I don't know how I deal with it, but that is a question that concerns every civilisation. Deep down I believe that the entire human construct exists in order to exorcise the fear of death.

And can it be exorcised, in the end?

We play games in order to exorcise it. But the games are beautiful. Suddenly you see masterpieces emerging, so that people can forget their mortality. But what is life? Everything we go through – that is life. Define it for me any other way. You cannot, however, face death fatalistically, letting it stop you from doing anything. Even if someone decides to commit suicide because they see no meaning in any of this, I accept their decision. Although – let me not be ungrateful – I have tasted life generously, faced with someone who holds this position on philosophical grounds I have no truly serious arguments with which to tell them “don't do it”.

From your contact with cancer patients and from the reactions of audiences, do you think that, as a society, we have learned over the years to talk a little more about these matters – cancer, in this case – or do they remain taboo subjects, hidden behind words such as “the accursed disease” and the like?

Look, Giannis, some things have certainly changed, because cancer cases have become very common now. You can't keep hiding it, but a large part of society is still behind on this. It is afraid, it doesn't talk about it, it regards it as a stigma. For example, when screenings of “METAXA” are held at an association connected with cancer patients, the turnout can be massive. That didn't happen at the Greek Film Archive. And many friends who know my work didn't come either, because they heard what the subject was.

Describe your own lifelong relationship with documentary.

Documentary has a wild beauty. When I was finishing at the Hatzikou Film School, most of us had the impression that documentary was something to do with archaeological, historical or nature subjects. Fortunately I found myself in France on a scholarship and came into contact with post-war human-centred documentary, and suddenly I discovered a dimension I had never imagined, one that was very close to my character and to the relationships I form with people, and I no longer needed screenplays or actors. Life itself kept feeding me with all sorts of things. My first sweet sensation from documentary is getting to know the other, the one who is different. All hatreds, all nationalisms, are the product of fear: we know nothing about the other, and the deprived part of our own lives comes and attaches itself to, invests itself in, the figure of the other, perceiving them as a permanent threat. The other is not like that. Just as you hurt, suffer, have anxieties and worry about how you will make ends meet, so do they. So in documentary, coming into contact with the person next door, you get to know them, and in the end the veil of threat and fear is lifted. This possibility of getting to know and sharing with the other is the allure of human-centred documentary. All the stories are in front of us; they have all been told. What matters is the aesthetics and the style with which you tell the story, what the person brings out in you, what fine “embroidery” you can do, and then, going into the editing process, how you will convey the feeling you have been left with.

If I wanted to give my work an ideal title, it would be that all of it consists of “stories of trust” between people. It is a difficult process. And fortunately, with most of them, we remain close friends long after the documentary is finished. You have to keep “watering” that friendship. And it constantly asks for more. You have no moral right to leave the other person stranded after they have opened their heart to you. Things aren't only about us.