The Tree We Hurt

The friendship between two small boys is at the centre of the account. The place is the island of Chios, the time a summer in the sixties. The one telling it is looking back from the present day. What he remembers are the weeks between the fourth and fifth grades. The children earn money by carrying crosses at funerals. As the gang grows the mischief grows with it. There is beating at the school, and elders beat the children too. That violence puts a break inside childhood. The account takes in nature, the animals and the sea as well. A first love belongs to that summer too. Dimos Avdeliodis’s Greek film of 1986 runs seventy five minutes.