Kostas Spiropoulos: Arcadia, Champagne d’Orient

A film about wine and greed... is the subtitle of this film that in many ways is closer to a fiction film than to a documentary. It is grandiose in its set-up and although it’s not always succesful in mixing the (much of it wonderful) archive with reenacted scenes , there is a drive in the narration based on diaries and documents of the time that made me enjoy the conflicts in the family with father Spyridon, the sons Nikos and Vasilis and the poor mother. They searched for fame, they got it, they were stubborn but had to deal with politics and politicians which had drastic consequences. With the wine as the loser, alas. In a good meaning: a fascinating old-fashioned documentary drama to be enjoyed.

And when I write old-fashioned I have to continue with some flowers to Kostas Spiropoulos: I can see how much he has enjoyed to make the film, to tell this story, how much effort and care he has put into the research to find the great archive material and turn some of the new scenes into b/w sequences. Is that old-fashioned, I am afraid so, when I think about the fast, non-aesthetic use of news material of today. Also chapeau for some of the composition of landscape images and interiors, there is thought about colours and framing. Paintings.

Une coupe de champagne, voilà!

Greece, 2022, 80 mins.

Read more here, also about the screening times in Thessaloniki.

https://www.filmfestival.gr/en/section-tdf/movie/1228/14248