Jorgosclick to enlarge pictures

The Lovers from Axos


ELEFTHEROTYPIA, 8th March 2008

Stealing the Secret of Love

Interview with Vangelis Vagelatos

Nicos Ligouris, director of the documentary film "The Lovers of Axos", came up with his subject quite by chance. In the summer of 2000 he was travelling around the island of Crete and came upon when he was a Byzantine chapel on Mount Ida. A local from the nearby village of Axos offered to guide him through it. Afterward, the villager, whose name was Jorgos, had an additional proposal: "There is something even more beautiful to see in our village. Would you like to see it?"





- "Three minutes later", recalls the director, "he directed me to a shop with woven goods beside the chapel and pointed to a woman seated at a loom with a gentle expression on her face."
"That's Maria. Isn't she beautiful?", he asked me. She was his wife!

Ligouris was gripped by the story of the man and his wife and remained so even after he returned to Berlin where he resides. Jorgos and Maria had fallen in love as teenagers and they remained bound to one another after 55 years. It was a love that grew more intense as it aged. Lately, however, their relationship was threatened by sickness. Jorgos was seriously ill and could die at any moment. Ligouris had just completed shooting another documentary film called "Summer Lightning" (which won first prize at the Thessalonica Documentary Film Festival 2004). The film follows a family from southern Crete who rent accommodation to tourists and who photograph the sea while waiting for new clients. It was at this time that the idea of a "Cretan Trilogy" began to take shape in his mind: The first film, "Summer Lightning", would be a philosophical tale on the theme of waiting, the second film a protocol of two souls. Jorgos and Maria are two wonderfully gracious and delicate human beings who conformed to no clichés. Jorgos, a humorous romanticist, remains totally dedicated to the love that has endured over so many years. His wife Maria is more melancholy and preoccupied with an uncertain future. For Ligouris, the most fascinating aspects about the couple were their exterior and interior beauty, the aura of their quiet existence, the absence of any element of possessiveness on Jorgos' part, their mutual concern for one another and their ultimate wish to die together on the same day. "The death knell should sound for both of us", they said.

"I thought to myself that I could not and did not want to explain the secret of their love. But I could chronicle it, steal individual moments in their lives, which at first seem unspectacular, but on closer inspection are magical", says Ligouris.

In 2005 Ligouris proposed to Maria and Jorgos that he make a film about them, and in September 2006 shooting began.

- Was it as easy as that?

"They agreed without asking many questions. It was enough for me to explain my reason: 'Because you are two beautiful people.' I don't really know why they agreed. Perhaps they wanted something of their love to survive. As far as I was concerned I imagined myself to be a kind of sculptor working on a monument to love. If there had been a monument, I would have inscribed the words "Amor omnia" below it."

Shooting proceeded without any hitches, according to Ligouris. The atmosphere between Jorgos and Maria was so wonderful that the director was reminded of Tarkovsky who believed that true love can never be happy.

"I discovered that he was wrong. I kept thinking about the novel 'The Little Horses of Tarquinia' by Marguerite Duras. In the book, Duras says that love never experiences a holiday, that it's something that is difficult, a routine that also encompasses phases of empty time. I believe Duras was right."

- How was it possible to avoid the temptations of fiction while dealing with this theme?

"What is fictional and what is documentary? Is 'El sol del membrillo' by Victor Erice a documentary or a feature film? The borders between the genres have become more fluid. One of the more significant differences for me is that feature film is made with actors while documentary film is created with 'real' people. You can forget any other differentiation."

Ligouris has said that his goal is to explore areas in documentary film that until now have only been touched upon by fictional or philosophical reflections... Areas such as the mystery and magic of everyday life, the inner world of the human being.

"The classic documentary film, the film that aims to find an 'accountant's truth' as Werner Herzog once described it, does not interest me. Nor do documentary films about 'hot' social issues that, in my opinion, threaten to degrade the genre to a barren, banal and conformist art form."

- How was it possible to avoid the temptations of fiction while dealing with this theme?

"What is fictional and what is documentary? Is 'El sol del membrillo' by Victor Erice a documentary or a feature film? The borders between the genres have become more fluid. One of the more significant differences for me is that feature film is made with actors while documentary film is created with 'real' people. You can forget any other differentiation." Ligouris has said that his goal is to explore areas in documentary film that until now have only been touched upon by fictional or philosophical reflections... Areas such as the mystery and magic of everyday life, the inner world of the human being.

"The classic documentary film, the film that aims to find an 'accountant's truth' as Werner Herzog once described it, does not interest me. Nor do documentary films about 'hot' social issues that, in my opinion, threaten to degrade the genre to a barren, banal and conformist art form."

- How do you go about telling a story such as The Lovers of Axos?

"I adopted the same style as writing a personal journal: It's Berlin on New Year's Day and I'm sitting in my room, leafing through a catalogue from a Picasso exhibition. Suddenly my eyes fall upon a drawing of a couple just after they have made love. At that moment I'm reminded of my friends from Axos whom I visited three months previously. My memories then coalesce into images and scenes from one day in the life of these lovers. The film does not claim to show the lovers as they are, but rather as I see them. My colleague and sound recorder Stergios Mountsakis calls this style of filmmaking 'conveying the documentary film in your head'."

- How do you convey the documentary film in your head?

"When I'm writing I work out everything that could be construed as a central theme in a person's life. Anything that possesses a novel-like, poetic or dramatic quality. Practically speaking, that means not only do you find real situations from a person's life in my manuscript, but also imaginary or, to be more precise, "possible" situations. Situations that could happen in a person's life. What's possible in a person's life is not contrived. However, in order to capture that, you need to have knowledge of the person - and respect, of course. You can never go beyond the horizon of possibilities that an individual has."


- And during shooting?

"You have to adhere to a strict form of documentary observation. I film objectively, like a reporter (of course I'm aware that that is not possible because even choosing the camera's position is a matter of staging). However, I never ask people to repeat "failed" scenes. I don't stage anything. But during editing I proceed in a contrary manner. I sort the material according to different categories: reality, fantasy, ideas, memories. Even dreams have a place in a documentary film as I see it. For example, if someone reveals his dream to me, I attempt to re-trace it, if it performs a justifiable function. But I don't seek to illustrate it, I seek to imply it, in order to capture the spirit of the dream rather than a literal representation."

- You also use music...

"Yes, I believe the purist condemnation of music in documentary film is dogmatic. Music is not only there to create an absent mood or to conceal faults. Music offers a way to convey new levels of meaning. In 'The Lovers of Axos', for example, the scenes showing the couple working are accompanied by a waltz from Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Why? Because for Jorgos and Maria work is a form of liberation. It snatches them from their thoughts and forces them to forget their worries. In my opinion, Beethoven's wonderful "metaphysical" music underscores in an ideal way the healing role of work in the couple's lives."

- Is there any other theme in the film aside from love and death?

"Yes, the theme of the warp threads... the way the threads are cleaned, spun and then attached to the loom. Hardly anyone has ever seen this process. It's a difficult, laborious and extremely strenuous task. A little like something called love."