The Eleusinians

Synopsis

Filippos Koutsaftis’s new film is a dynamic portrayal of Eleusina in the form of a mosaic which enriches and places within the framework of a grand narrative, the little stories told by its inhabitants about their life and relationship with the city.  His depiction of Eleusina as a vast collection of individual portraits is such as to give the term anthropography an almost literal dimension in that the city is essentially the sum total of its citizens, both eponymous and anonymous, past and present, living and dead.

The undertaking began with the more than eighty hours of archival material collected by the director during the filming of Mourning Rock, his first film on Eleusina, from 1988 to 2000.  New elements from the 21st century were now added to this material forging a creative interweaving of timelessness and synchronicity and rendering cinematic time in the present continuous, whether on a micro level with testimonies and images of daily life or on a macro level with reflections and vignettes that shed light on the cultural heritage and local history as well the tectonic shifts that are forming the new face of the city.

With the Eleusinian Mysteries as its compass and by exploiting their universal implications and existential dimensions, Filippos Koutsaftis ultimately uses his material as an ontological reference point around which the portrait of a specific and historical Eleusina is also the portrait of a symbolic and visionary Eleusina, a city that transcends geography and constitutes the spiritual capital of the European and the Western world in general.