Alkisti Efthymiou: Searching for Katerina, or Danai, or?

During the Onassis AiR Tailor-made Fellowship, I dug into the letters of Katerina, mapping out the details that she had intentionally left out and filling these voids with my own imagination. I also collected and digitized my family’s tapes from the 1990s in Greece, shot in hi8 by my dad or recorded directly from the TV. This footage includes news clips and, mainly, myself aged 2 to 7 in weddings, casual family moments, birthdays, and other celebrations. Katerina’s appearance pushed me to search for her traces in me, starting from my childhood. In these cassettes, which I was watching for the first time, I read my gestures as a girl through a different lens: my outbursts of energy, my confusion and awkwardness at the performativity of my female gender, my role-plays, my reactions when asked to enter the “grown-up world”. I began to recognize these traits as early manifestations of my queerness, where being queer is an endless negotiation, exhausting at times. I realized that, as a queer person, to have somewhere to root yourself in is a crucial survival tactic: it could be a family member that you read as similarly queer or a childhood memory that “proves” that you have always been this way. Even if no such thing exists in your life, you find ways to invent it, so as to embrace the fact that what makes you who you are is in constant flux and conversation with the past and the future. If our present as (queer) femininities is traversed by stories invented and constructed by the family, the nation, and its myths, then it might be in our hands to rewrite these stories otherwise. Katerina would be part of this rewriting.

In the start of my residency at Onassis AiR in September 2022, I participated in the DasArts Feedback Method Workshop led by Manolis Tsipos, which proved very useful for identifying the priorities of my research during the rest of my stay. After this workshop and considering the comments I had received from my peers, I decided to abandon the idea of further investigating the case of Danai Stratigopoulou and get deeper into figuring out my own role in the film. For Open Day #1, I presented a 5-minute video where I experimented with editing together the different footage that I had gathered: my family’s tapes from 1990s in Greece, amateur footage from the 1950s and 1960s in Chile, and contemporary scenes that I had shot on the hi8 camera that my father used. From that first public screening, I received very positive feedback, which encouraged me to keep practicing the form this film might take. For Open Day #2, I played with various layers of superimposition, resulting in an installation where Katerina’s letters were leaking into the video projection’s surrounding space.

With the help of the Onassis AiR Team and through the presentation of my work in the Open Days, I met Mina Dreki, who was interested in producing “Katerina” with Marni Films. This meeting and subsequent collaboration proved crucial to ensure the project’s future. After the Tailor-made Fellowship, Mina and I participated in the Agora of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in March 2023, where “Katerina” won the Agora Lab award, and have received funding from the Greek Film Centre for script development.

Onassis AiR’s Tailor-made Fellowship played a significant role in transforming what started as a mere idea for a film into a feasible hybrid documentary project.