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 simple and, at the same time, impossible: what does it mean to “dwell” today? How can we live together and love one another in a city that is changing faster than we can comprehend?

Athens is at a turning point. The economic and housing crises, soaring rents, touristification and the gentrification of neighborhoods, the transformation of homes into investment assets, and the emergence of ghettos are eroding the small-scale forms of social interaction that once defined the city. And yet, within this suffocating landscape, the Athenian apartment building, aka ‘polykatoikia’—that unruly yet profoundly social construct—continues to propose another way of living together. Vertical social segregation, mixed-use spaces, adjoining balconies: all these give rise to a form of everyday democracy. It is not the perfect building; it is the porous, osmotic one, the building that allows for unlimited adaptability.

A structural element of the narrative is the idea that life is a metaphysics of mixing. Thus, the film unfolds in nine ‘stanzas,’ like a piece of music or a poem. This structure allows me to connect insights from architecture, anthropology, art, geography, zoology, and ethology and translate them into everyday language, beyond conventions and narrative disciplines.

I bring Athens into dialogue with Berlin through people and stories that embody Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, in search of two opposing forces: that of history—the material conditions and social relations of modernism—and that of redemption, the potential for happiness hidden within those conditions, particularly within the structure of the polykatoikia.

The camera moves as an extension of my body, revealing not just images but relationships. In the tradition of ethnographic and decolonial cinema, it changes hands: it is handed over to four young people who, like latter-day ‘natives,’ live together in a penthouse on Acharnon Street and record their daily lives with pets, friends, and objects. The camera ceases to be a tool of observation and becomes a space for living together.

I am interested in the home not as a building but as an ethical reality. The ‘migrant’ parrots restore this concept to its true dimension: home is where you care for someone.

Athens, in its own peculiar way, is a city built upon this ethic of care. The interiors of homes—the landscape of the things we inhabit—along with the shops and services housed within the same shell ultimately shaped the city. Commodities are not merely utilitarian objects; they are goods because they carry meanings, signs of a supreme Good—a particular version of our happiness.

Athens was shaped not by urban planning visions, but through the ‘marketplace of Goods’—a network providing access to everything that ensures care, coexistence, and small moments of happiness. The market has always been a space for collective evaluation, where values emerge from encounter and negotiation. When goods began to circulate through apartments, small shops, and apartment buildings, a new democracy was born—petit bourgeois, domestic, yet profoundly human.

That is why the city has no center; it has webs. The desire to care for others and be cared for has been translated into architecture. This, I think, is what makes Athens distinctive: a city built not according to the logic of planning, but according to the logic of care, within the legal frameworks that made it possible.

This is the true strength of the Athenian polykatoikia: a simple place and a simple way to make the world habitable. And if this is the major political issue today—the possibility of inhabiting our cities and the world once again, of making them feel like home—Athens still has things to propose, however much we destroy it, however little we understand it.

– Tassos Langis