Tassos Boulmetis Travels Back To 1960s For His New Film ‘Notias’

At first glance, the Lazaridis leather goods store in the arcade at 69 Academias Street in downtown Athens seems perfectly normal, with elegant leather purses and suitcases displayed in its window. When the shopkeeper and the customer start talking, though, it becomes apparent that we are not in the present day, as the potential buyer explains that he is planning to travel to Frankfurt by coach and would like to buy the red suitcase in the display window, which is just like the one shipping tycoon Ari Onassis is holding in a photograph displayed beside it. The shopkeeper warns him that it’s expensive at 400 drachmas but he’s willing to knock something off the price.

Outside the shop, the arcade is bustling with elegant ladies with well-coiffed hair, a young man delivering coffees on a traditional metal tray and another man carrying large film reels. While the weather and traffic outside tell us that its the spring of 2015, in the arcade, the clock has gone back to 1968 for the filming of Tassos Boulmetis’s latest project, “Notias” (likely to be titled “South Wind” in English, according to the director).

Boulmetis sits in his director’s chair and orders the “shopkeeper” (played by Taxiarhis Hanos) and the “customer” (Errikos Litsis) to repeat the scene again and again so that he can get the perfect take. In parts of the arcade, the production team has created convincing scenes depicting Athens as it was in the 1960s and 70s.

Boulmetis is joined behind the camera by his assistant Margarita Manta, an acclaimed filmmaker in her own right, veteran sound mixer Marinos Athanasopoulos and costume designer Eva Nathena, who reigns over the fifth floor of the arcade, where the costume department has been set up.

In the entrance, the extras, dressed, coiffed and made up to the tiniest last detail, wait to be called for a scene that they have to repeat more than 20 times. Before the crisis, the standard wage for a film extra was 50 euros a day. Now they’re being paid half that.

My conversation with Boulmetis happens in fits and starts, between takes. “Notias” is Boulmetis’s third feature-length film after “The Dream Factory” (1990) and “A Touch of Spice” (2003) and tells the story of a boy (played by Giannis Niaros) growing up in the turbulent and promising 1960s and 70s and his journey from adolescence to adulthood as he tries to make his dreams come true.

To read more, please visit: Ekathimerini

by Maria Katsounaki