“W” by Stelios Koupetoris – the six minutes worth seeing today

Every child should be able to go to school. Every teacher should be able to give their classes. Every person should be able to learn, to live, and to be free. “W” – the short film by Stelios Koupetoris – is back on the Onassis Channel on YouTube, and now more relevant than ever.

Embedded media

If you want to enjoy embedded rich media, please customize your cookie settings to allow for Performance and Targeting cookies. Your data may be transferred to third-party services such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Issuu.

Customize Cookies

“W” won the Greek Union of Film, Television and Audiovisual Technicians (ETEKT-OT) Honorary Distinction for Technical Excellence at the 2019 Drama International Short Film Festival. The short film screened on the Onassis Channel on YouTube in 2020 as part of the “Big Feelings, Small Screens” online film program.

Synopsis

A teacher is set to do his daily classroom at the school he works, during one of the most difficult days to teach.

Director's note

“What is that wonder we are all made of?” Α teacher is doing an introductory class in anthropology and asks several questions about homo sapiens’ past and the driving force behind all humans' actions: need.

Long time ago there was an old chain of environmental changes that led the ancient forests to shrink, consequently forcing our apes ancestors to seek food to the open valleys. This changed their nutrition and forced them to form stronger social bonds and evolve their minds in order to be able to hunt collectively big sized preys and face dangerous hunters. Their intelligence and their societies were the only tools they had, in order to work their way through evolution. This is the “need" that our teacher refers to. The necessity to collaborate and create strong, long-term bonds. Collectivity, friendship, mutuality, sexual relationships and companionship became the primal need of human beings to stay alive. We were forged to love each other by thousands of years of struggle to escape extinction. And we learned through this timeless process to communicate our most fundamental, intimate and most complicated feelings with the most unimaginable and sensitive means of expression: Arts and languages. Because arts is a form of language and language becomes art when is used to express feelings. We wouldn’t stand a chance surviving in that wild ancient world without being able live with each other and die for each other. And the only way we will be able to survive through this wild modern world will also be to stand for each other; this time against our own savagery.

Credits

Starring: Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos
Directed by Stelios Koupetoris
Screenplay: Stelios Koupetoris
Cinematography: Nikolas Pottakis
Music: Stelios Koupetoris, Nefeli Stamatogiannopoulou
Sound: Giannis Fotopoulos
Sound Design: Stelios Koupetoris
Set: Dimitris Ziakas
Production: White Room