Mourning Rock

The documentary takes up Eleusina in Greece. Eleusina today is a place that industry has spoiled. The same ground once held the Eleusinian Mysteries. Those ceremonies brought the ancient Greeks to a knowledge about life, death and what comes after. The film sets those two conditions, the past and the present, side by side. The contradiction between them becomes the account itself. The director filmed the same place over years; ruins, factories and the people living there enter the same frame. The eighty seven minutes are given to a single town, and the contradiction between what it was and what it is now runs through all of them. Panagiotis Farmakis appears in Filippos Koutsaftis’s Greek documentary, completed in 2000.