Interview with director Sofia Exarchou for her first feature, "Park", in theaters since July 8 in France, the story of a band of adolescents and pre-adolescents left to fend for themselves in the Olympic Village of Derelict Athens.
Tamasa Distribution AlloCiné: How did Park originate? Was it this place, its occupants? Sofia Exarchou (director): Most people imagine that this film was inspired by the Olympic Village in Athens, but the truth is that my starting point was to paint a portrait of a group of children living in an abandoned place and in a social environment leaving them no escape and no hope for the future. I started looking for this place around Athens and it was there that I came across the Olympic Village and its history. It was only built for the needs of the Games without any urbanization plan. All his houses are identical, it was that of the athletes. It is surrounded by a fence, completely isolated and close to the national road, far from any residential area.
This place seems abstract, as if it could be from any era or from anywhere in the world and at the same time, it has a strong symbolic value for Greece. The 2004 Games gave the country great hope, but ultimately marked its collapse. It now exists as a no man's land not because of a war or something like that, but because of the Games. And I find it fascinating to talk about it. (...) I wanted to show the contradiction between the image of this new generation and this "haunted" place. The story of this "big show" and the collapse after the "show".
We see that the young people who live in this Village are idle and left to fend for themselves. Since when has the situation been like this?The Village is real, but Park is not a documentary. It is the mixture of a real environment and imaginary characters and stories. (...) When I started to write the screenplay, I knew that I didn't want strong narration or directions imposed on children. I wanted to be honest with this reality, having no strong dreams when you live in such a place. (...) The dream of these characters is just to escape from it. I wanted the audience to try to penetrate this psychology at every moment of the film. This is so that viewers leave the cinema with a feeling of what it means to live in a place like this and when I say that, I am referring to any place that would have the same problems. (...) Isolation, the need to feel alive, the absence of parents, the desire to be assertive, to accept and accept oneself.
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You talk about realism without falling into the documentary. Was it difficult to maintain this balance?It was one of the most difficult challenges of the film: trying to combine this raw and very intense realism with a very precise stylistic approach and a strong symbolism. It was complicated, but it was the main idea from the start so I tried to apply it in all of our choices during the creation of this film (casting, staging, costumes, etc.).
You hired non-professional actors, how did you work with them on their performances?We did a first casting session for six months and auditioned more than 500 children. From schools, schools of comedy, schools for immigrants. We also did wild casting. In the last stage of casting, we started group auditions with improvisation games to create a group of boys who would go well together, could communicate and [dont les membres] would rest on each other. (...) At the start of rehearsals, I improvised a lot with the children to determine what character preexisted in them. I wanted to know who was the most aggressive, the funniest, the strongest and who would be the leader. The script created the characters but I wanted to see the real children inside the characters.
All the scenes were written and the script very elaborate - I worked two years on it. But when I started these rehearsals with the children, a lot came from them and became very important for the film. Except for the two main protagonists, none of the children had seen the script. They just knew they were a group of friends living in the Olympic Village for the summer. I said to them "we have a scene in the shower, you're very hot, someone is trying to turn on the taps. Let's play with that" (...).
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The scene in the shower of "Park"
Anna is the only girl in the group of boys. She is a former athlete who was training for the Games but was involved in an accident and forced to give up. She was so young and yet already retired to one of the houses in the Village. This past and its history are visible on the wounds of his body. When I wrote, she was the character who most represented the Village and the heart of the story. The Games and the consequences of the Games. (...) The allegory which she carries, her wounds, her sensitivity and her pain as well as the fact that she is the only female character among these boys makes her, I believe, so special to our film.
Since its first screening in 2016, releasing Park in France has taken time. Has it become more difficult for independent films like yours to get out in theaters and not on a platform?Yes, it has become increasingly difficult for independent films to go to theaters and it is very sad. I would like to thank Tamasa Distribution all the more for their interest in our film and for taking this risk.
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Dimitra Vlagopoulou (Anna)
I am currently working on my second feature film called Animal. The main characters are a group of entertainers who pass every night on the stage of a large class B hotel on the coast of a Greek island. The story of this wild summer takes place in the spotlight, between fun games, dance performances and backstage night meetings. The screenplay was chosen to take part in the prestigious Cannes Festival Workshop, which unfortunately took place online this year. We are in pre-production, we are auditioning our main characters and looking for the two main filming locations.
"Park" was released on July 8 and is currently in theaters:
