SCULPTED SOULS

“To seek out man wherever he may be...” — Seferis

1. What was the spark that made you make this particular film?

The choice of “subject” is a pretext that gives me the framework to be able to talk about what really interests me: the people we meet, who move through the stories we tell. Our films are not described by their “subject”, and I myself am neither moved by nor start from anything of the kind. Some years ago the critic Manolis Kranakis wrote: “The people who ‘star’ – the talking heads – in Stavros Psillakis's films are, before the ‘subject’ they recount, themselves the ‘subject’ of his work. A body of work that, you might say, documents the human condition because it finds it more fascinating than any other... documentation. ... S.P.'s path is the one that each time begins and ends with the person facing him, on the straight line where the gaze of one meets the gaze of the other.” He wrote that in 2016. An illuminating view for me too, which to a great extent also sets the tone of the works that followed, if it doesn't actually foreshadow them. In the trilogy ODES TO EXISTENCE (FOR NO REASON — encounters with Giorgos Maniatis, DEBT, FAREWELL — the memory of the land) and in SCULPTED SOULS, these observations of Kranakis's are far more evident. The approach to the people, freed from the need to showcase the “subject”, is worked on in its own right and given shape even further.

In SCULPTED SOULS, the central figures are the Swiss dentist Julien Grivel and the former Hansen's disease patient (leper) Manolis Fountoulakis. For 26 years (1972–1998) Julien (b. 1943) came to Athens twice a year and cared, free of charge, for the teeth of Hansen's patients at the “Agia Varvara” Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Aigaleo, Attica. Manolis Fountoulakis was a patient at “Agia Varvara” and shares with us his experience and his memories of the period when lepers were a public enemy and the rejection, exclusion and social stigma they endured were perhaps harsher than the disease itself. For Julien, his relationship with Uncle Manolis was catalytic in his getting to know modern Greece and its people. But the film focuses neither on the history of leprosy nor on Julien's act itself, for all its greatness.

In the film we follow Julien's inner journey, against this backdrop, as he lives through this experience: “An inner journey that helped me see the world and life differently. I gained a different perspective on life, new fragrances. ... Through this experience, I feel deep inside that by giving, I am enriched. ... With these people I spent moments of eternity, and they taught me not to be afraid of death,” he tells us at one point.

Throughout the film our “hero” speaks very good Greek. He learned it little by little, with great effort and zeal, and it was a sign of respect and love for the people who taught him so much, but also for something more: “By adopting the language of the Greeks, I unconsciously adopted their way of thinking too. An inner dive into a country that gave me, and continues to give me, the ‘beautiful journey’, as the Alexandrian [Cavafy] says” we hear him say again in the film.

All this, I think, was a great spark and motivation to grow fond of Julien and also of his wife Christiane, who often accompanied and helped him, and to build a wonderful friendship. After that, the film was easy to make. All of us lived the shoot as a very enjoyable game.

2. In the film you raise, discreetly but clearly, the issue of social exclusion. How much did that concern you?

The film is essentially made in the editing room, and this issue concerned us a great deal. Most of the information about leprosy, the patients and their confinement is given to us by Uncle Manolis, as Julien calls him. A very strong presence, with spellbinding speech and accounts that always pulled the story towards leprosy, and that called for great care, because it wasn't our subject. It took many months of editing, reflection and revision for things to find their balance – I would like to believe – without any cuts on the issue of social exclusion.

I should point out here that we never met Uncle Manolis. He had died in 2010. His presence in the film comes from archive material very generously given to us by our friends and colleagues Thodoris Papadoulakis and Silas Michalakas. Each of them had filmed him, for their own reasons, shortly before he died and very close in time to each other.

Briefly, in the film, the Franco-Swiss architect Maurice Born also appears in a TV programme: a very important researcher and a remarkable man who had studied places of confinement, and Spinalonga in particular, since he spent long periods living in the area. The existence of our film, as well as that of the emblematic documentary L'ORDRE by Jean-Daniel Pollet, is essentially owed to Maurice Born, as we learn in the film.

We did not go onto Spinalonga itself. In the end it was a conscious choice of ours – a very apt one, as it turned out – which started from the great bureaucracy the undertaking required, which discouraged us. Our subject was not leprosy, and a visit to the island, I believe, would have carried us away. But we see it all the way round from a small boat carrying Julien and Christiane, who comment on it. Among other things, Julien recalls the testimony of one of his patients: “Spinalonga is the Minotaur of modern times, glutted with so many victims”, and the words of Epaminondas Remountakis (a legendary figure of Spinalonga): “people will visit Spinalonga and kneel, wishing to wash away with their tears the shame for everything that happened there, and they will leave this place, leaving it in the sacred silence it deserves. Let their loved ones honour their pain.”

3. How did you experience Spinalonga as a child and as a teenager, and what did the island mean to the local people?

Here I think some historical facts are useful. Spinalonga (a small island, once an important Venetian fortress, opposite Elounda in the Lasithi prefecture), as a place of confinement and isolation for Hansen's patients (lepers), operated from 1904 until 1957. It then closed for good, and the patients, from all over Greece, were transferred to the “Agia Varvara” Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Aigaleo, Attica. The first drugs to treat the disease appeared in our country after the war, around 1948. When Julien Grivel began his treatments in 1972, Spinalonga had already closed for good. But many of his patients at “Agia Varvara” had come from there.

In the years when I was growing up in Chania, in the '50s and '60s, for us there were no lepers and no Spinalonga. Whatever had existed in that connection at the beginning of the last century had been banished into silence. The only time I remember hearing about lepers was in the parable of the ten lepers, in religious education. Of course, for children growing up in the wider Elounda area things would certainly not have been like that, but I cannot know. In later years, realising what an enormous social stigma leprosy was, especially before the war, I understand why the word was hardly ever heard. It had been exiled, just like the lepers on Spinalonga. Today Spinalonga, with its impressive Venetian fortifications, once identified with leprosy, is a major tourist attraction with thousands of visitors every year. I cannot know what all these visitors see and feel...

4. You are an acclaimed director who sticks with documentary. Why? Have you never thought of making fiction one day?

Creative documentary – let's call it that, as a convention, since there are only good films and bad films – is a fiction film, but one made on different terms. The end result is a construction, a creation, and it is made in the editing room. Moreover, “Whatever I describe describes me”, says the poet Argyris Chionis, and that is not true only of documentary. So any notion of truth, objectivity and the like is foreign to me; it is not part of my intentions and I believe in no such thing.

Summing up my experience of human-centred documentary, I would say that when you film a person or a situation, you are at the same time filming yourself. That is how your “protagonist” converses with you, and it is you who sees your “subject” and the world that way. Out of the thousands of possibilities that existed, this is what you chose to be interested in and to shed light on. Everything depends on the “quality of the encounter” and the relationship between those talking. We call it “aura”, we call it “chemistry”, and so many other formulations, politically correct and acceptable enough to get by... It would be more accurate to speak also of the eroticism of the people that their relationship ignites. A film, good or bad, is not made by its subject. The subject is always the pretext, the backdrop against which you will build your creation and speak about your anxieties and your questions. And the point is not what you will say, but how you will say it.

That by way of introduction, because next – and forgive my lack of modesty, but modesty befits the person and not their work – I will hand over to the great filmmaker, creator and human being Robert Manthoulis: “In Greece we have adopted a strange cinematic term, ‘documentary’, and very few people know exactly what it means. ... Documentary may be a term, but it is not a ‘genre’. It is the spitting image of cinema, which sometimes uses actors and sometimes non-actors playing themselves. That is the cinema Psillakis makes ... To better describe cinema without actors, the Russians and later the French would call it ‘cinema-truth’ (even though ‘cinema with actors’ is also part of the truth). We call it ‘creative documentary’ to distinguish it from reportage and the other ‘opportunistic’ videos we see today. ... A documentary is a creation like God's. Just as God made the world, you make a documentary, under exactly the same conditions...” And in another text, a contribution to a debate, he notes: “Cinematic fiction, with the fairy-tale scripts of men in ties, is the opium of the people! – Dziga Vertov shouted, for his part. Long live life as it is!”

I always make fiction. That is how I experience it, it suits me, and I miss nothing. In fact I am glad that each time I set out I don't know what I am going to do. That is the beauty of creation. “I carve, and it will show me what shape to give it”, Michalis, an artist confined in the Chania Psychiatric Hospital, replied when I asked him what he was doing as he carved a stone (THE MAN WHO DISTURBED THE UNIVERSE). And Maniatis, in FOR NO REASON, assures us: “I don't know, I don't know, and that's why I write. Because you don't sit down to write what you know; you sit down to write what you don't know.”

So: long live life as it is!

The making of the film began as an initiative of the “Manolis Fountoulakis” Library, directed by Stavros Psillakis. The film was produced by Matthaios Frantzeskakis – CRETAN CULTURAL ORGANIZATION. It is co-produced by COSMOTE TV, was made with the support of the Region of Crete and the Municipalities of Agia Varvara (Attica) and Agios Nikolaos (Crete), and the promotion co-producer is Foteini Oikonomopoulou / OhMyDog Productions. The film has been selected for the International Competition section of the 27th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival and will be screened on Wednesday 12/3/2025 at 20:00 at the OLYMPION (Aristotelous Square) and on Thursday 13/3/2025 at 15:00 in the John Cassavetes hall, Warehouse 1, Port.

PS. The excerpts by Manolis Kranakis and Robert Manthoulis quoted here are from the book SMALL ADOPTIONS — a tribute to the work of S. Psillakis, published by the CRETAN CULTURAL ORGANIZATION – PYXIDA TIS POLIS in 2016.