Tassos boulmetis biography of mahatma
TB: Absolutely. After a professional crisis, a friend of mine suggested I go back, just to see what it looks like. In , I went and that was the journey of my life. It started healing the trauma that I had because of the displacement. TB: I was looking for talent of course, but also, for specific roles, I was looking for people who could speak and understand Turkish.
How I found the actor for the grandfather was very interesting. He was a very famous theater director, Tassos Bandis; I arranged a meeting with him in order to ask him to suggest some actors that had come from Istanbul in Greece. DB : In the film, Fanis cooks a lot to connect with his culture; is that a characteristic you share with your protagonist?
Tassos Boulmetis - Biography - IMDb: Tassos Boulmetis. Director / Screenwriter / Producer. Tassos Boulmetis studied Physics in the University of Athens and Film Production and Direction at the University of California (UCLA), with a scholarship support from the A. Onassis Foundation. At UCLA he taught as a teaching assistant classes on directing actors for film and television.
TB: Since I was a little boy, I was cooking with my mother and my aunts and their friends. It was a fusion type of cooking because you have the influence of all these cultures that existed in Istanbul — Arabic, Balkan, Byzantine, Ottoman. All of these cultures have been mixed into a beautiful cuisine, … and in all cultures, spice is a metaphor of making our lives interesting.
The film was distributed in 45 countries, so in every single country they used the most favorable spice that is used in the territory. The spice is a metaphor for having a life worth living. Thursday, Jan. It appeals to the Greek Diaspora. Hellas Filmbox is a new Festival, which began last year. It is organized by young, energetic people and I dare say that it accomplishes its aim in the sense that it brings Greek film to the German public, 20 days before the Berlin film festival.
It also brings them in contact with distributors. Loss constitutes a prominent issue in your films. How do you perceive the feeling of loss at a period of crisis that Greece is going through?
For me, there was a sudden realization. I was enjoying success during a period of prosperity for Greece Olympic Games etc. At the same time, I was intrigued by an idea which I was trying to approach in a humorous mood, despite the fact it was hiding something serious: what happens to a family or a society when it starts to deconstruct the myths on which it has build its narrative?
The entity of a community runs through a history, a narrative. So what happens to this community when you start to deconstruct them? The answer is simple: the community falls apart.
As I said, this was a concept that intrigued me, but the only way for me to express it was through a humorous story. I had been working on this concept, when two events occurred in two unpleasant events that helped me understand what was hiding beneath my thoughts: the first tragic event for me was losing both of my parents within a year; the second was that Greece officially entered a crisis.
I was overcome with emotion as Greek society was going through this loss. On a personal level, I had lost the people closest to me and as a member of society I had lost an era that would never come back.
Tassos boulmetis biography of mahatma
I realized then, looking back at my previous films which include my first, lesser known film that the core of my work is about loss and how people deal with it. By realizing that loss is the running theme in my films, I felt the urge to talk about the time I was a teenager, when I decided to become a film director and study film in the USA.
So the film takes place between , after the fall of the Junta, to I left for the USA in , the beginning of the period during which the script of the crisis we are currently undergoing was written. To me, the whole spectrum of Greek politics from Right to Left holds its own part of the responsibility. In the years following the fall of the dictatorship, all political parties promised prosperity.
PASOK, the ruling socialist party of the time, undertook the task of realizing that promise for prosperity and today we are experiencing the results of that promise. In a sense it is, as far as values are concerned. Throughout this time, the political parties, accordingly to the time they stayed in power, promoted corruption at the expense of ethical values.
On the other hand, younger viewers tell me they envy the protagonist who left to pursue his dream. So the father makes up and sells a story, a myth.
Mother is aware that the story is a fake, but pretends to believe it, in order to keep her family together. Thus, there is a silent, unspoken and unconscious complicity for the survival of this nuclear family in a society that seeks prosperity. Parents in your films serve as a comic relief. Does this reflect the way you perceive Greek family and parenthood?
I totally agree with your remarks; and yes, it does reflect my personal experiences.
I also have a brother whom I love very much and he likes to joke with me because he is absent from my films. I tell him that if I put him in the film not only would the cost of the film rise, but the psychological toll on me as well, because there would be an extra relationship for me to analyze! On the other hand the characters of the parents relate to my cinematic references.
These quarrels reminded me a lot of the ones we used to have at home. What is the role of women in «Mythopathy»? Has it served as a political allegory in the film?
Biography of mahatma gandhi
In the film, my hero is trying to understand himself at a time when his sexual awakening is taking place. This is a part of his personal journey towards the construction of his sexual as well as individual identity. Unfortunately, he happens to be extremely unlucky, because he fantasizes of women who are linked to politics.
Politics, in one way or another, take away from him the objects of his desire one by one. I used this concept as a vehicle to show that politics have taken from Greeks everything they desired. You work on your own, carefully elaborated stories with a historical background, persisting on minute detail. How easy is it to fund an expensive film production in the current economic situation?
Not easy at all. I also had other sponsors with product placement in the film. There were also other co-producers that contributed with digital effects. As far as historical dramas are concerned, digital effects are of a great help but they are also very expensive.