Initiatives Onassis AiR Onassis AiR Programs 2022/23

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

In 2019, Alkisti, an anthropologist and filmmaker who lives between Greece and Chile, stumbles upon the most important coincidence in her life: the letters of Katerina. These letters date back to the 1950s and 1960s and were sent from a woman named Katerina, who lived in Chile, to Alkisti’s grandmother, who lived in Greece. Through reading the letters, Alkisti finds out that Katerina had moved to Chile because she had an affair with a female Chilean poet.

Inspired by the weirdly metaphysical similarities between Katerina and herself, Alkisti decides to create a hybrid documentary based on the letters. She weaves her own experiences and concerns into the life of Katerina, looking for an uncompromised sense of queer feminist belonging that transcends time and place.

“Katerina” stands as a hybrid film in which fiction and reality intertwine; it is a study of how women’s experiences from totally different times, territories and generations converge, revealing to the spectator the mechanisms with which patriarchy has constructed the narrative of femininity. In a present where thousands of women take to the streets to articulate gender- and sexuality-related demands, one of the main aims of this project is to introduce new questions about how invasive the discourses of power are in shaping our identities, excluding by default the marginalized, the illegitimate, and what is believed not to adhere to the established canons.

The support of Οnassis AiR is crucial in the research stage for this project, in order to contextualize Katerina’s story and discern her motives. With this objective, Alkisti will conduct interviews with her family members, review amateur audiovisual records, and investigate the case of the Greek singer Danai Stratigopoulou, who migrated to Chile during the Greek dictatorship (1967-1974), joined the intellectual circles of the left, met Pablo Neruda and translated the “Canto General” into Greek, in the hope that she could be a reference point for understanding Katerina.

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Video still. “Katerina” (provisional title) by Alkisti Efthymiou. Onassis AiR Open Day #2, 4 November 2022.

Creator's Note

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.