The Milos Revisited project presented by Iro Diamandourou – january 2021 :
“The whole project began by chance. In 2006 my father asked his cousin Thanassis to bring him all 1950’s Super 8 films that had been shot by Thanassis’ father, Agathocles Cypriotis — one of my grandmother’s brothers. My father’s wish was to see his grandparents featuring there. We bought a second-hand made-in-Russia projector just for this purpose and took a film randomly out of the box. The very first film we saw was about people taking the olives out of the trees, working in golden fields under the sun, working at salt pits, building houses under the rain, joking etc. It was a full presentation of Milos’ Island life in the 50s and …everything was in coulour! The shootings were perfect. We saw a real cinematographer’s eye. It was such a tremendous surprise!
We spent many days watching those films, saw our grandparents as well, but saw too many interesting and important things. This led us to the decision to make something out of the footage. We built our small film production company which we named Ironick Ltd. deriving from Iro and Nick (mine and my husband’s names) and started our shootings on the island, with my father as a connection, since he knew some of the people: Agathocles had been his beloved uncle and my father had spent with him some of his summers on Milos, when we was 19-20 years old.
On Milos, at our great surprise, we discovered that most of those persons were still alive. We interviewed all of them and, after 2 years — and more than 40 hours of footage — we started working on the project, almost only by ourselves. Finally, it was ready to be sent to the 2009 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, where it had quite a success. Right after this, the National TV Channel rent it for a first TV screening, then followed the Parliament’s TV Channel, then OTE TV channel and finally we started selling the DVD in shops.
Some years later, Walter Hubka, an Austrian mining engineer who had worked (and become friends) with Agathocles Cypriotes at that time, wrote a book on his memoirs of Greece where he had worked in the fifties, right after WWII. We published this book (bilingual, Greek/English) in our publishing house, Archeio Books, who had been created thanks to my mother’s desire in 2013, right after film production in Greece had become rather impossible because of the country’s bankruptcy.
The originals belong to Agathocle’s son, Thanassis, but we still keep them — together, of course, with their digitized version.”
Technical details
EPISTROPHI STI MILO – MILOS REVISITED (2009)
Director: Nikos Alpantakis
Writer: Iro Diamandourou
Language: Greek
Subtitles: English
Also known as: “EPISTROFI STI MILO” – ΕΠΙΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΣΤΗ ΜΗΛΟ
Produced by Ironick Ltd – Archeio Books
- Nikos Alpantakis producer
- Iro Diamandourou producer
- Paris Diamandouros executive producer
Music by Iro Diamandourou
Cinematography by Nikos Alpantakis
Film Editing by Nikos Alpantakis
Sound Department Stelios Mihailidis
Technical specifications
- Runtime: 1 hr 20 min (80 min)
- Sound Mix Stereo
- Color
- Aspect Ratio: 1.78 : 1 / (anamorphic)
- Negative Format: DIGIBETA
Film’s release
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 15/03/2009 ; Countryside Documentary and Animated Film Festival 30/07/2009 ; Halkida Documentary Festival 08/10/2009 ; Benaki Museum 07/11/2009 ; Thessaloniki Documentary Festival – “Aegean Stories” 16/03/2010 ; Parliament TV 23/05/2010 et 05/06/2010 ; Culture Unplugged Film Festival 2012 ; Greek Cinematography Club Premiere at The Center of Greek Civilization, Moscow 16/12/2013 ; OTE TV 2016
Other
- Milos Revisited Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/milosrevisited/
- Ironick Ltd film production company, after having produced 3 documentaries on Greek islands (Milos and Aegina) https://www.archeiobooks.com/documentaries shifted to publisher’s house, named Archeio (= archive) Books, which aims at bringing out of the drawers old and forgotten or non-compiled texts of either well-known or totally unknown people and present them to a larger public.
- DVD + Walter Hubka’s book’s page
Find the synopsis in the part Filmography of the Inedits website and the teaser here.