The Public Private House: 9 Stanzas for Athens by Tassos Langis - 2026

How does the future of Athens look through the eyes of those who inhabit the layers of its architecture—tenants, young people, immigrants, or birds? "The Public Private House: 9 Stanzas for Athens", a documentary directed by Tassos Langis and produced by Onassis Culture, is loosely inspired by two books, themed around the Athenian apartment blocks (polykatoikías): "37 Stories from the Athenian Apartment Blocks" and "The Public Private House", from which it also borrows its title.

The Public Private House is a film essay in nine stanzas, discussing Athens, habitation, and the search for perspective—or outlook. It follows four young women who live together in a penthouse on Acharnon Street, in a neighborhood of intense ethnic and social stratification. The director’s gaze focuses on a participatory documentation ‘from within,’ abolishing hierarchies and avoiding interpretation. The academics on screen do not hold titles or roles; instead, they switch positions equally with the four women, their friends, and the various bird species that inhabit Athens. They all have the same substance, the same narrative space. The film chooses to see the city not from above, but through what it calls “domestic happiness”: through the lives that struggle to hold on, that leave for a “better” something, that strive to belong. At the core lies the apartment block not as a simple building, but as an archive of lives, uses, dreams, transformations, and separations.

The premiere will take place on December 1, 2026, on the Onassis Stegi Main Stage. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director.

A Note by Tassos Langis

The question is both simple and impossible: what does it mean to inhabit today? How can we coexist and love within a city that changes faster than we can comprehend?

Athens stands at a turning point today. The economic and housing crises, the skyrocketing rents, gentrification and touristification, the transformation of homes into investment products, the emergence of ghettos — all these forces erode the small forms of sociability that once defined the city.

And yet, within this suffocating landscape, the Athenian apartment building, the polykatoikia, with its anarchic yet profoundly social construction, continues to propose another way of coexistence. Its vertical social segregation that prevents ghettoisation, its mixed uses, and its adjoining balconies give rise to a form of everyday democracy. It is not the perfect building, of course; but it is porous, osmotic, one that allows for infinite adaptability.

A structural element of the narrative is the idea that life is a metaphysics of mixing. Thus, the film unfolds in nine ‘stanzas,’ like a piece of music or a poem. This structure allows me to connect insights from architecture, anthropology, art, geography, zoology, and ethology and translate them into everyday language, beyond conventions and narrative disciplines.

I bring Athens into dialogue with Berlin through people and stories that embody Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, in search of two opposing forces: that of history—the material conditions and social relations of modernism—and that of redemption, the potential for happiness hidden within those conditions, particularly within the structure of the polykatoikia.

The camera moves as an extension of my body, revealing not just images but relationships. In the tradition of ethnographic and decolonial cinema, it changes hands: it is handed over to four young people who, like latter-day ‘natives,’ live together in a penthouse on Acharnon Street and record their daily lives with pets, friends, and objects. The camera ceases to be a tool of observation and becomes a space for living together.

I am interested in the home not as a building but as an ethical reality. The ‘migrant’ parrots restore this concept to its true dimension: home is where you care for someone.

Athens, in its own peculiar way, is a city built upon this ethic of care. The interiors of homes—the landscape of the things we inhabit—along with the shops and services housed within the same shell ultimately shaped the city. Commodities are not merely utilitarian objects; they are goods because they carry meanings, signs of a supreme Good—a particular version of our happiness.

Athens was shaped not by urban planning visions, but through the ‘marketplace of Goods’—a network providing access to everything that ensures care, coexistence, and small moments of happiness. The market has always been a space for collective evaluation, where values emerge from encounter and negotiation. When goods began to circulate through apartments, small shops, and apartment buildings, a new democracy was born—petit bourgeois, domestic, yet profoundly human.

That is why the city has no center; it has webs. The desire to care for others and be cared for has been translated into architecture. This, I think, is what makes Athens distinctive: a city built not according to the logic of planning, but according to the logic of care, within the legal frameworks that made it possible.

This is the true strength of the Athenian polykatoikia: a simple place and a simple way to make the world habitable. And if this is the major political issue today—the possibility of inhabiting our cities and the world once again, of making them feel like home—Athens still has things to propose, however much we destroy it, however little we understand it.