TTS

Set in a remote mountainous region near Melivia, Greece, this short film is a portrait of a place where the boundaries between memory, folklore, and everyday life gradually dissolve.

Built around real stories shared by local residents, relatives, and the people whose stories have accompanied me from childhood to the present day, the film combines documentary observation with narrative storytelling. Fragments of lived experience coexist with urban legends, rural myths, personal memories, and inherited beliefs, creating a landscape where fact and fiction naturally intertwine.

The camera follows the rhythms of rugged local life in the present: people shaped by the mountains, animals roaming freely through fields, forests and rivers, and the countless insects inhabiting the undergrowth, tree bark, stones, and abandoned corners of the landscape. Beetles, moths, spiders, flies, grasshoppers, bees, and other small creatures are not incidental details but an essential part of the film’s living world. Their presence reveals a territory where every form of life, regardless of scale, contributes to a shared ecosystem and a sense of belonging.

Rather than documenting a disappearing way of life, the film observes the coexistence of people, animals, and insects as equal inhabitants of the same landscape.

Their communication is something of a lost-in-translation experience. People, animals, and the landscape seem to exist beside one another without ever fully understanding each other, connected through gestures, instincts, routines, and sounds. Abandoned places suggest that something else has taken over, perhaps monsters, perhaps memories, while authority appears as an unseen force that takes care of everything, or claims to.

Together, these elements form an intricate web of relationships in which seasonal rhythms, labor, survival, beliefs, and stories of kings and queens have evolved alongside one another for generations. The boundaries between the ordinary and the mythical become increasingly unstable, allowing the landscape itself to become a storyteller.

The film features music by sound artist AMR, whose immersive sonic practice forms an integral part of the film’s atmosphere. In dialogue with the natural sounds of the landscape, the composition expands the space between memory and imagination, inviting the viewer to experience the territory as much through listening as through seeing.

Rooted in my own experience of growing up in this region, the film becomes both a personal return and a collective portrait of a community whose identity has been shaped by the land, its wildlife, and the stories it continues to tell to the present day.

At its core, the film is about coexistence: between humans and nature, reality and myth, the visible and the unseen. It is a cinematic exploration of a territory where rugged lives, ancient beliefs, animals, insects, abandoned places, and imagined creatures become witnesses to memory — revealing a world in which every living being, and perhaps every monster, has its place.

bio

bmin0r is a photographer, filmmaker and video artist. With a background in analogue street photography and moving image, he uses a variety of analogue and digital media in his work in an attempt to explore constant documentation as a way of shaping the contemporary individual’s sense of self.

Ο bmin0r είναι φωτογράφος και video artist με έδρα την Αθήνα. Η πρακτική του αναπτύσσεται γύρω από ερωτήματα που αφορούν τη χρονικότητα, την ασυνέχεια, και τους τρόπους με τους οποίους προσωπικό και συλλογικό συνδέονται ή διαχωρίζονται. Με υπόβαθρο την αναλογική φωτογραφία δρόμου και την κινούμενη εικόνα, χρησιμοποιεί στο έργο του ποικιλία αναλογικών και ψηφιακών μέσων σε μια προσπάθεια να εξερευνήσει τη διαρκή καταγραφή ως τρόπο διαμόρφωσης της αίσθησης εαυτού του σύγχρονου ατόμου.