The Public Private House: 9 Stanzas for Athens | Tassos Langis

What does it mean to inhabit today? How do we coexist and love within a city that changes faster than we can comprehend?

The film "The Public Private House: 9 Stanzas for Athens" is an Onassis Culture production, made in collaboration with Eye Film and loosely inspired by two publications dedicated to the Athenian apartment blocks (polykatoikias): "37 Stories from the Athenian Apartment Blocks", published by the Onassis Foundation, and "The Public Private House", which lends its title to the film.

Like a piece of music or a poem in nine stanzas, Tassos Langis’ film becomes a polyphonic urban essay on the city of Athens, collective habitation—human and nonhuman alike—and the need to find a new perspective, both literally and metaphorically.

The film centers on the apartment block as an archive of lives. Four young women living together in a neighborhood marked by intense ethnic and social stratification become the protagonists of a story about what happens behind doors, on balconies, and in the city’s communal spaces.

The film will premiere in Athens—the city it was made for—in December 2026. A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening.

The question is both simple and impossible: what does it mean to inhabit today? How can we coexist and love within a city that changes faster than we can comprehend?

Athens stands at a turning point today. The economic and housing crises, the skyrocketing rents, gentrification and touristification, the transformation of homes into investment products, the emergence of ghettos — all these forces erode the small forms of sociability that once defined the city.

And yet, within this suffocating landscape, the Athenian apartment building, the polykatoikia, with its anarchic yet profoundly social construction, continues to propose another way of coexistence. Its vertical social segregation that prevents ghettoisation, its mixed uses, and its adjoining balconies give rise to a form of everyday democracy. It is not the perfect building, of course; but it is porous, osmotic, one that allows for infinite adaptability.

– Tassos Langis