The impossible narration: Memory and photography of the Kalavryta Slaughter
Greece, 2021, 25′
Director: Konstantinos Kalantzis
Producer: Konstantinos Kalantzis, PhotoDemos: Citizens of Photography
The impossible narration explores the difficult memories of a massacre perpetrated by the German Wehrmacht in the town of Kalavryta, Greece in 1943. The film focuses on survivor Giorgos Dimopoulos and his narration of the day of the slaughter which he experienced as a 13-year-old boy, who was by chance spared execution. Dimopoulos takes the director and the audience on a walk where he retraces the steps that he took that day, particularly after fleeing from the elementary school in which other women and children were held captive. During the walk, he remembers the people, the landscape and the things he encountered: from burning houses that collapsed amidst fruit groves to a frightened girl that he reencountered some 70 years later as an old woman. The protagonist also discusses with the filmmaker the difficulties and (im)possibilities of narrating this slaughter, and of turning his raw experience of the past into visual and verbal representations.
