Absentees, Nightflowers, The King, Vigilance, The Soul in the Mouth, Isovites, Norway, Attenberg, Knife Puller, Little Fish, Digger. Just a few titles in a total of over 35 films in more than 30 years of consistent and silent film career of Vangelis Mourikis, emblematic protagonist of modern Greek cinema. Vangelis Mourikis is also the honored person at this year’s Berlin Greek Film Festival.

Greek film noir, action films, experimental cinema, collaborations with important Greek filmmakers who have carved new paths, Nikos Grammatikos, Yiannis Economidis, Yiannis Veslemes, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Tzortzis Grigorakis and many others. A cinema that has been charting its own course for years, far from the easy-to-digest and easy-to-sell, deeply social and political. Folk heroes, simple, lumpen, delinquent, from the world of the night, sometimes surreal and sometimes realistic, always with their own truth.

For Vangelis Mourikis, cinema by definition contains the political element. “We make films in Greece. Greece is a country where politics has always been one of the main daily topics. It was the conversation in the coffee shop, on the benches, in the streets. Since we go so far back in the 30 years we’ve been making this kind of cinema, the world back then was very politicized. Political elements are thus always present in a direct or indirect way”, he says in an exclusive interview with DW.

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Revisiting “The King” in 2023

The multi-award winning film “The King” directed by Nikos Grammatikos (2002) and starring Vangelis Mourikis is expected to be screened again at the Berlin tribute. There he plays a young man who has just been released from prison and decides to return to his abandoned ancestral home in a village in the Peloponnese, facing the suspicion and eventually the violence of the locals. A film about the “scapegoats” of every era, as Vangelis Mourikis explains to us, which involves a fundamental contradiction: it was filmed just before the 2004 Olympic games, in a climate of general uplift, but focusing on the dark side of Greek society: the racism and the fear of the different, the foreign, the unintegrated. As Vangelis Mourikis observes: “We have seen and seen the same ‘film’ repeated over the years in various sectors and this is a nightmare. We don’t actually learn from our mistakes. And a small interest is usually always what determines our own destinies and the world’s.”

“The King” also confronts the viewer with the question: who is the perpetrator and who is the victim? Should we deal with crime when it happens or prevent it? As Vangelis Mourikis tells us, “it is the most played film in detention centers in Greece, with the most recent showing at the second chance school in Corfu”. There has even been a sociological analysis of what this film means to the prisoner, which was even republished by the official police magazine. “Prisoners identify and are concerned with the issue of reintegration into society, with the question of ‘what am I going to do next’.”

However, if one looks at the films and roles of Mourikis as a whole, one can immediately distinguish an ascetic commitment to a specific type of heroes: invisible people, mainly from the “social fringes”, with personal darkness but also searches. He himself says “yes” to scenarios that immediately speak to his emotion. “I’m trying to understand the world, the circumstances, the space in which the case unfolds, who the other people are. I’m not doing anything special. I just do what the script says,” he explains to DW. From then on, “the world of each hero is the world of the film. It is a special world of its own. Of course, the issues may touch the outside world as well. But what we call the world of the script has priority.”

Contemporary Greek cinema inside and outside Greek borders

Films like “The King” undoubtedly belong to the important moments of modern Greek cinematography of the last decades. And if modern Greek cinema does not often find the recognition it deserves within the Greek borders – for reasons usually unrelated to the film production itself which requires great personal costs – abroad it lives a new parallel, often glorious life. “These films have a pretty good run abroad, they are films that go around the world. Abroad it seems that they wanted to see this way of Greece” observes Vangelis Mourikis. This happened for example, as he tells us, with Tsaggaris’ “Attenberg” which was awarded at the Venice Film Festival, Economides’ “Little Fish” which entered the competition section of the Berlinale or Grigorakis’ “Digger” which has also been awarded at the Berlinale a little before the pandemic.

“How will the Greek audience, the Greek moviegoer return to the Greek film? This is a question with many parameters”, notes Vangelis Mourikis. The structure and thematics of the films are for some the two main axes of the debate. From there on, important issues of distribution, promotion by the media and of course state support are also raised. “It’s quite difficult to commit to this genre. It’s a life choice. Personally, I would rate it positively” he answers to those who ask him why he persists all these years on this rough road of Greek cinema without deviations. “From there on, the effort that is being made is not the work of one person, but it has to do with the whole world of Greek cinema, which managed to show a face of Greece to the outside world,” says Vangelis Mourikis, adding: “There is this moment young children capable, older ones who have matured. There is life in all that is called cinema.”

Cinema as “thrill of the moment”

As for what cinema means after all this long and exciting journey in front of and behind the cameras, things are simple and clear for Vangelis Mourikis: “It’s the emotion of the moment. This is what I have learned. Where yours joins the rest. When that spark catches fire, you’re gone. This has a me value. These moments are unique. When your own request is immediately recognized by others and becomes one with them”.

The Eighth Greek Film Festival in Berlin (The Greek Film Festival in Berlin) is organized again this year at the Babylon cinema from 29.03 to 2.04.2023. As part of the Festival, the films “The King” by Nikos Grammatikos (2002), Norway by Yiannis Vesleme (2014) and “Isovites” by Theodoros Maragos (2008), where Vangelis Mourikis stars.