Under The Lake

Greece, 2022, 16'

Helpless spectators of the gradual disappearance of their village, bound to sink into the waters of an artificial dam, the inhabitants let themselves go to the opposite, the upstream of memories and thoughts, of mute and accusing glances. Faces turn to stone, moving images become decaying statues, everyday actions – such as thread spinning, walking, hunting – take on a mythic dimension, and a definitive one regrettably; the weather – fog, snow, the morning mist, the dark at night – rests on the earth like a funereal shroud. And yet something endures, something still lives in this mountain that man’s geometry has transformed into a land of ghosts.

Thanasis Trouboukis has found in the Greek hinterland, in Tzoumerka – a small town in Epirus that has now disappeared – an actual place transformed in an imaginary one thanks to the thick, evocative grain of 16mm film stock. “How does the memory of water work?,” the young Greek director seems to wonder. What wins over the work of time and death? Possibly, the violent flow of the past, or the fire that paradoxically arises from the depth of the abyss…