Untitled Ringo Starr Biopic

The life of tobacco farmers in Gazoros village, Serres province, Greece. In 1974, shortly before he and Lakis Papastathis launched the legendary Paraskinio [Backstage], which was to define a new era in Greek TV documentary, Takis Chatzopoulos visited Gazoros, a small village of tobacco workers in Serres, with "two people, a 16mm camera and a tape recorder." He was to record more than the everyday life of a place marked by the struggle of making a daily wage, the heartache of emigration, and the ground zero of a whole country in violent transformation. True to his principles that "there is no cinema outside the class struggle" and that "documentary is created, reconstituted, composed in the editing room," he separates the villagers' narratives (of which the film exclusively consists) from the images of their daily lives, liberating an incalculable amount of authenticity based on human toil, survival, and the dream of a better life. While it feels as though he is preserving the historical memory of the place, essentially letting the village tell its own story, Chatzopoulos also engages in a timely political commentary on this very need, disrupting the established anthropogeography of the Greek countryside and the concept of poetry as it sneaks into the documentation. The microcosm of Gazoros becomes Greece in miniature, his documentary forming a testimony that is both historical and timeless. —Thessaloniki Documentary Festival