.

Agelastos Petra was the name of the stone on which Demeter rested during her search for her daughter Persephone which Ades kidnapped to the Underworld.
The place therefore was considered sacred and the Eleusinian Mysteries were held there to honor the goddess, possibly originating all the way back to Mycenean times (1200 BC) - according to some theories - reaching their peak during the Golden Age of Pericles.

Filippos Koutsaftis' 12-year-long genius work connects bits and pieces from ancient times to modern, connecting past and present, memories of lost for ever places and people, in a subtle underlying fabric of nostalgia, of glorious times replaced by barbaric modernity.
Conserving the Eleusinian motive of death and rebirth, the life cycle, we follow the stories of several modern refugees, having lost everything in the Ionia - Asia Minor disaster of 1922, but being reborn to modern Eleusis, in a new life, in a new world.

The storytelling does a great job enhancing this spirit of nostalgia, at times mourning for the destruction and disrespect by the modern 'civilization' to a culture that was, and still is, the source of inspiration and the reference for the western world.
And, as shown even by the demise of the simple milkman with the horse carriage, the quality of the past is not replaced.

One tiny but astonishing detail that shows the coexistence of past and present and the continuity of culture :
In the mythology, the 3 Fates set a rule that whoever consumed food or drink in the Underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Before Persephone was released to Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Ades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds (either six or four according to the telling), which forced her to return to the underworld for some months each year.
As it is passingly mentioned in the film, to this day, pomegranate seeds are still used when providing the offering to the dead in the Greek Orthodox church.

свернуть