Magdalena Hausen – Frozen Time

Written / Directed by Yannis Karpouzis

Logline
German photographer Magdalena Hausen crosses the political landscape of Europe in her quest to make a photograph of the wind. An experimental film about political identity, history and the inner workings of memory.

Political essay, Experimental
Duration: 24min
Greece / Germany
Completed August 2024

Funded by NRW Kunststiftung, Greek Film Center and Hellenic broadcasting corporation,
Magdalena Hausen: Frozen Time is an art house political short film.

 

Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Lina Helfrich, Sandra Sieber, David Brückner, Andreas Pietschmann, Ines Schiller, Jonas Riemer
Writer / Director: Yannis Karpouzis
Distribution: Sayonara Film
Director of Photography: Giorgos Frentzos GSC
Music: Eleni Karaindrou, Dimitris Miyakis, Costis Zouliatis
Producers: Lejla Aliev, Jan Enste, Yannis Karpouzis
Assistant Producer: Spyros Patsouras
Motion Design: Kreon Krionas
Makeup-artist: Carlotta Cécile Whan
Costume designer:
Johanna Schraut

Back in the days no one got what they were asking for. And now, years later, times like these seem to be closing in again Magdalena Hausen

River’s Curve – Frozen Time

Written by Yannis Karpouzis, Calliopi Beku / Directed by Calliopi Beku

Logline                                                                                                                                                                                    In the heart of the boreal forest, on the curve of the Arctic Circle, the Sami have gathered every year for four centuries to exchange goods and stories in the town of Jokkmokk. A creative documentary about the open geographies at the end of the world.

Runtime: 13′
Shootings in 16 mm color and B&W
Genre: Essay Film – Documentary

Looking for co-producer in Sweden.

“Can you hear the sound of life in the roaring of the creek in the blowing of the wind. That is all I want to say that is all”Nils-Aslak Valkeapää

Yama

Written / Directed by Andreas Vakalios

Logline
Independence Day in Athens. A girl lights a small fire and tells a small lie about a boy. Small racist lies easily get out of control. So do small racist fires.

Coming of Age
Duration: 15min
Greece
Completed 2022

Funded by Greek Film Center.

Cast: Giorgos Adamandiadis, Stefanos Damianidis, Blerim Dhampiraj, Maria Karantinaki, Nikos Mavroudis, Giannis Nanis, Efthalia Papacosta, Kostas Vakalios, Nikos Zeginoglou
Writer / Director: Andreas Vakalios
Distribution: Freak
Director of Photography: Fili Olsefski
Art Direction by Eva Goulakou
Art Department Sofia Vaso

“So that’s where my family’s fate was determined, with exiles, refugees, repatriations. In short, with a different outcome, I would not have existed.”
Andreas Vakalios

Left Behind

Written / Directed by Yannis Karpouzis

Logline                                                                                                                                                                                     Nefeli, a young left activist, is making a vernacular diary film to tell her boyfriend Pavlos that she wants them to break up.

Diary, Arthouse
Duration: 13 min
Greece
In Production

Funded by Greek Film Center. Supported by Rent Photo Video, Stefilm
Looking for: distribution, film festivals, sales

 

 

Cast: Nefeli Kouri, Yannis Beretsos, Eleftheria Konstantopoulou
Music: Pan Pan
Writer / Director:Yannis Karpouzis
DoP: Fili Olsefski
Sound Design / Mixing: Dimitris Miyakis
Graphics /Titles: Andreas Vakalios
Art Direction: That Studio

For the truth of things to appear, their images must suffer.Stavros Stavridis

111 – Tinos

Produced by Fluxum Foundation

Choreography by Ioannis Mandafounis.

Logline                                                                                                                                                                                    One One One is a creation by the dancer and choreographer Ioannis Mandafounis. Two chairs await two spectators, inviting them to experience a unique moment during which two performers will dance for them.

Greece / Switzerland

Premiere in ArtGenève 2023

In the summer of 2021, Flux Laboratory Athens invited filmmaker Yannis Karpouzis to accompany dancers Despina Sanida-Krezia, Leda Diochnou, Thanos Ragkousis and Symeon Tsakiris on a dance experience in Greece: a series of performances followed an imaginary sea route: from the port of Spetses, to the slopes of Dimitsana, to the lake of Stymphalia, to the mountainous village of Vyzitsa, to the lagoon of Messolonghi and the waters of the island of Tinos.

Concept and choreography: Ioannis Mandafounis
Performers:
Leda Diochnou, Thanos Ragkousis, Despoina Sanida Crezia, Symeon Tsakiris

Mediation: Mélanie Fréguin
Production: Cie Ioannis Mandafounis & Flux Laboratory Athens
DoP: Claire Aimee
Directed by: Yannis Karpouzis

“Yannis Karpouzis’ camera documented the process, resulting in a series of experimental documentaries on the performance process, interweaving the dance movement and dancing bodies, with the bodies of the spectators-participants and their landscapes.”

Searching for Thule

Written by Yannis Karpouzis and Alexander Strecker

Directed by Yannis Karpouzis

Logline
In her quest to solve the riddle of Europe, a passionate  scholar reconstructs the journey of the ancient Greek sailor Pytheas from Marseille to the mysterious country of Thule.

Feature Essay
Duration: 74min
Greece / Iceland / Belgium

In Development

Production by Laika Productions

Co-producers: Firnindi-films, Harald House

 

Director of Photography: Giorgos Frentzos GSC
Producers: Marina Danezi, Friedrik Thor Friedrikson

Around 300 BCE, the remarkable adventurer Pytheas set out from the Greek colony of Marseille to explore the frozen, fabled, and terrifying lands of northern Europe. Pytheas’s voyage, beginning on the Mediterranean Sea and reaching towards Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, the Shetland Islands, and the Faroe Islands, is retraced through a collection of film archives, archaeological surveys, and fragments from ancient literature. Ultimately, the journey reaches the mythical land of Thule, at the end of the earth, on the black coasts of Iceland and the melting glaciers of Greenland and the North Pole. As we retrace this journey in the present through images of everyday life, landscapes, history, myths, and monuments, the complex patchwork called Europe unfolds before us. Threading this patchwork together is the desire for knowledge, exploration, and cultural exchange. This essay film delves into the search for European identity, the continent’s ancient heritage, and the meeting of the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean.

“On the map, the route Pytheas took forms an arc from the 
Mediterranean to Iceland and embraces a large part of the area we call Europe, both geographically and historico-culturally. The story of Pytheas’s ancient journey has as its central theme the interpretation of the physical world using science, experiment, and observation.” Yannis Karpouzis

A short story of resistance

Written by Yannis Karpouzis / Diamantis Anastasiadis / Katia Goulioni

Directed by Diamantis Anastasiadis

Logline
Ioulia Bimba, a teacher married to a blind fisherman enters the Greek resistance movement after an apocalyptic vision triggered by the demolition of the Nazi flag in Acropolis

Political essay, Experimental
Duration: 14min
Greece

Funded by  Greek Film Center

“I don’t know what to say. Something deep inside was calling me, something was pressing me: now it’s your time, you ought to do something. Our time needs it.” Ioulia Bimba

Nikos Karouzos – Poems on the tape recorder

Directed by Yannis Karpouzis
Written by Ilias Liatsopoulos – Andreas Vakalios

Logline                                                                                                                                                                                    In the midst of the economic crisis, a persistent researcher delves into the eventful life and the unexplored work of preeminent Greek modernist poet, Nikos Karouzos. Through photos, archives, super 8s, videotapes and memories, he travels back in time accompanying the poet from the traumatic postwar history of Greece to the Academy of Stockholm and all the way to the 1921 rebellion of Kronstadt in order to find a lost film footage.

Creative Documentary
Duration: 100 min
Greece
Completed February 2020

Funded by Greek Film Center and Hellenic broadcasting corporation.

Cast: Dimitris Katalifos
Director: Yannis Karpouzis
Writers: Andreas Vakalios, Ilias Liatsopoulos
Director of Photography: Yannis Kanakis, Yannis Karpouzis
Research: Ilias Liatsopoulos
Translations: Costas Koutsikouris
Editing: Leonidas Papafotiou
Original soundratck: Cleon Antoniou, Giannis Haroulis, Lefteris Andriotis
Sound: Costas Fylaktidis, 17 Poisoned Englishmen
Color Grading: Grigoris Arvanitis / authorwave

Left-wing and Christian, a hermit and an alcoholic, the damned poet Nikos Karouzos is the central figure of this hybrid-genre essay film. In order to piece together the poet’s life journey, a frustrated researcher takes us through the Aegean archipelago’s prison islands, the Swedish capital of Stockholm, the historical Russian island of Kronstadt, the “city of crisis” Athens, and across a vast archive of celluloid memories. A story about life and death; Greece’s troubled post-war history and the advent of Spring.

Parallel Crisis

Photobook

Hardcover 116 pages 19 X 27
Photographs: Yannis Karpouzis
Design: Ioannis Markakis
Texts by: Moritz Neumuller, Yannis Karpouzis
Printed by: Kostopoulos printing house
Published by: Empty Square With the support of Greek Ministry of Culture June 2021 – ISBN 978-618-84981-0-5

Description
After the year 2010, a destructive financial crisis has struck Greece, dismantling an already wrecked social balance and driving the population into a state of collective depression. A condition of stagnation is ruling the capital city of Athens.The project Parallel Crisis is a creative document that addresses the ways in which the Medium of Photography is capable of describing this socio-economic event.

“Each animal is defined by a blow” Heracletus, late 6th century BCE.

 

An uneasy affinity develops between the property of photography to produce events of immobilized time and the negation of social time that widespread crisis instigates. What photography is really recording in Greece is a certain condition of numbness: subjects without the possibility of development, crippling unemployment, confined migrants, neighborhoods reigned by silence and fear. In these conditions, the Medium suspends time that has already been stalled. Photography itself is conceived as a metaphor, a mirror of the financial crisis. Even further, the immobilized time of Photography intersects with the negated time of its subjects (referents). Parallel Crisis is in the end a project about a relation. The relation between a social crisis and a still image (a photograph).

This project was awarded:
The Descubrimientos prize PHotoEspana 2015
Athens Photo Festival Portfolio Review 2016

Exhibitions:
PhotoEspana 2016
Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award 2016
Med photo 1
Photobeijin 2016
Benaki Museum – Deste foundation – New Museum of New York
Athens photo festival 2017
PH Museum – Which Europe Photobook Week Aarhus Dummy Award 2018
Photo Bienalle – Thessaloniki contemporary art museum