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 Monday, March 9, at 18:00, at Warehouse 1 - John Cassavetes Hall, in the presence of the contributors. A Q&A session will follow.

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.

ONASSIS CINEMA

New cinema. New worlds.

At the Onassis Foundation, we love reading scripts, watching films, both new ones and the classics, taking part in festivals, and becoming an active part of artistic creation. Onassis Culture supports established and emerging creators through script development and the production of short and feature length films, fiction and documentaries, animation and live-action. We showcase the work of major filmmakers at the Onassis Stegi, from Wim Wenders to Charlie Kaufman, and we host masterclasses to discover how they think.

We collaborate with major cultural institutions such as the Hellenic Film Academy, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the Drama International Short Film Festival and the Athens International Film Festival “Opening Nights”, with the aim of empowering Greek cinema both domestically and internationally. We screen award winning short films on the Onassis Channel so that everyone can access independent productions. We have established the Onassis Film Awards to support the development of new scripts. Because life with cinema is always better.