The Magic City

The film looks at poverty in postwar Athens. Kosmas, a young man living in the shanty district, tries to make ends meet and hopes for a better day. Because of his debts he gets tangled up in smuggling; his morals are tested and he looks for a way out. The film shoots the district on location and neither romanticises it nor shows it as nothing but misery. The account gives crime not as a flaw of character but as a door opened by debt. It came to be counted among the first works in Greek cinema of the mid fifties to turn toward social realism. George Foundas plays the lead in Nikos Koundouros’s eighty minute Greek film, completed in 1955.