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.

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.

Following two recently dead people who wander Athens as ghosts, the film explores mortality, interacting with the urge toward belonging and our human desire to leave something, some trace, behind, as well as our twin desire for self-obliteration.

Street photography, historical footage, and old home videos interlaced with the body of the film, shot on location by Michał Dymek, underscore how the “now” will become the “then,” how those of us living today become the ghosts of tomorrow.

Athens, a city in which the bones of history are always on display – whether it's living scars from the dictatorship of the 1970s, or the presence of monuments that stood at the time of the plague of two thousand years ago – is the perfect place to explore the tangle of past and present, how the policies and longings of the dead go on living within us.

What does it mean to let go, to say goodbye; to move through time, through life without clinging to it? As ghosts, Anthi and Rateb occupy a liminal space. Both had struggled with difficult relationships in life, and now, as they try to understand their current situation, the echoes of those struggles persist.

It mattered in life that they were outsiders – for reasons of culture, sexuality, temperament – but in death, they learn it doesn’t. The identities and relationships that seemed so crucial have evaporated, along with much of what they had understood to be important. So, what’s left?

These were their lives. This is what happened to them. It doesn’t need to be fixed, because it can’t be fixed. It is enough.

For me, this is a powerful way of experiencing the world: to be present, keep looking, keep experiencing, without the need to hoard one’s experiences in a kind of scrapbook that we will never be able to go back and read. I think of all the photographs we all seem to have now, thousands and thousands of frozen moments that none of us will be taking with us when we go. As our ghosts explore the world from the other side of the divide, their gaze is both more forgiving and more austere. With a certain wrenching sadness, they come to an understanding, and with that understanding comes freedom. They’re at last able to embrace the coming adventure, the mystery toward which all of us are headed.

–Charlie Kaufman