Synopsis:
An imaginary revival of a few moments in Athens 1960 with actress Melina Merkouri and director Jules Dassin, around the time of the release of the film Never on Sunday. Old photographs are brought to life in a subtle animation made from multiple exposures of old negatives in the darkroom today. A flash of the unseen and unheard. An attempt to bring the dead back to life.
Directors Note:
Melina Merkouri was a Greek actress and later politician. Her breakthrough came with the film Never on Sunday 1960 by director Jules Dassin who had come to Europe to film as he had been blacklisted in Hollywood as a communist. The film premiered in Cannes and Merkouri won the award for best actress. Growing up in Sweden I used to watch this film over and over again. My parents had also met in Greece. My mother a Swedish tourist, my father a Greek photographer. They married in 1966, a month before Melina and Jules, but shortly after my father got TBC. They moved to Sweden temporarily to recover as my mother was a nurse. This coincided with the military junta in Greece and my father who had also been listed as a communist. Watching Never on Sunday brought us back to a time that would never return. And myself, I imagined my life as an adult. My parents never moved back to Greece and my father eventually left his profession. After his death I found a box with negatives he took of Merkouri around the time of the film. Many of them taken in her home, some together with Dassin. I began making paper copies in the darkroom and noticed they could be ordered into sequences. And as I made several copies of each negative the process began to resemble my own work with stop-motion. A subtle moving image emerged. An attempt to revive a few distant moments, bring the dead back to life.