How to Shoot a Ghost | Charlie Kaufman

The award-winning director of "Synecdoche, New York" and "Anomalisa", as well as Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind", Charlie Kaufman, filmed "How to Shoot a Ghost" in Athens, “a city in which the bones of history are always on display,” as he notes.

The film explores mortality both as a fact and a metaphor, and is the second part of a diptych—following "Jackals & Fireflies"—both written by poet Eva H.D. In the film, two newly dead ghosts roam the streets of Athens, drifting through the pulsing cityscape and the lingering echoes of history. They were outsiders in life: he, a queer Lebanese translator; she, a half-Irish photographer. As they wander the city together, they find solace in the difficult beauty of life—and what comes after.

Regarding his choice of Athens as the film’s backdrop, Kaufman explains: “Athens is a city in which the bones of history are always on display—whether it’s the living scars from the dictatorship of the 1970s or the presence of monuments that stood during the plague that wiped out so many citizens two thousand years ago. It is the perfect location to explore the tangle of past and present, and how the policies and longings of the dead go on living within us.”

"How to Shoot a Ghost" is an Unmade, Soft Focus Films, and Monarch Kaleidoscope production, co-produced with Green Olive Films, in association with Nightjar Films and Liaison Pictures, with the support of Onassis Culture and the participation of the Athens Film Office and the Municipality of Athens, starring Jessie Buckley and Josef Akiki, with cinematography by Michał Dymek and additional cinematography by Giorgos Koutsaliaris. The film had its world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, and it will be screened for the first time in Greece at Onassis Stegi.