Akadimia Platonos (2009)

Akadimia Platonos is a district located to the northwest of the centre of the Greek capital, Athens. This area took its name from Plato’s Academy. It is densely populated with people who mostly live in very large, low, two-storey buildings.

This is the setting for the film Akadimia Platonos, written and directed by the Greek, Filippos Tsitos. The film, screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 2009, is centred on the key issue of the intercultural tensions that are soaring in contemporary Greece precisely at the time when international public opinion began to become aware of the economic crisis. Presented in the form of a comedy, the film tells the story of the owners of four little stores who open the shutters of their shops every day and sit together drinking and making racist comments about the Chinese and Albanian workers on the construction sites nearby. The mother of one of them, who suffers from severe amnesia, introduces a second key issue in the story, that of memory and the ability to recast the past in the light of the present.

Whereas, in the Academy of Philosophy inspired by Plato, idealism and the world order were discussed, in the suburban square of Akadimia Platonos, the descendants of Ancient Greek culture drink, play football and insult immigrants. This ironic depiction emphasises the contrast between the exchanges of xenophobic remarks and the ancient Platonic dialogues on collectivism and the construction of ideal cities.

Born in Athens in 1966, Filippos Tsitos studied marketing at the University of Athens and began working as a director of photography and assistant director on several documentary films, and as a producer of a number of music programmes for  radio. He then moved to Germany (the country that co-produced Akadimia Platonos with Greece), specialising in direction at the German Film and Television Academy of Berlin. His narrative skills emerged in the short films he directed, especially Parlez-moi d’amour, winner of the German Short Film Award in 1994, which told the story of two immigrants in Germany, a Greek and a Russian, who meet in a bar and try and hold a conversation even though they do not speak the same language. His debut feature film, My Sweet Home, was selected at the Berlin Festival in 2001 and tells the amusing story of a party before the wedding of a German woman and an American in exile.

Tsitos explains that “it was being away from Greece, leaving my country, that made me want to study and understand it.” And he adds: “It was after I came to Berlin that I became really interested in my origins. I started to write stories and create my personal vision of Greece.  In order to develop a sharp and original perspective, I needed to have some distance from the geographical point of view.