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Series of half-hour documentaries on various neighborhoods of Athens.
Each neighborhood corresponds to an architectural concept-word that characterizes it both physically and socially. This word serves as a guide in the perspective, the selection of characters, and the elements of each neighborhood's portrait.
Exarcheia of challenge, Kolonaki of aristocracy, Omonia of the marginalized, Kypseli of immigrants, Kaisariani of refugees, Kifissia of decentralization, Aspropyrgos of the industrial zone, Paleo Faliro of memory, Akadimia Platonos of glorious past, Ekali of the elite, Ilion of denial, Perama of shipyards, Olympic Village of youthful dominance, Gerakas of anarchic development.
Historical and new neighborhoods of Athens reveal their true nature through a conceptual game with the words that architecturally and sociologically characterize them, the people who inhabit them, and the position they claim in the new cultural map of a city that stubbornly refuses to acquire a specific identity, constantly balancing between its heavy past, transient present, and uncertain future.
Three young directors - each with their own perspective - discover the keyword of each neighborhood, overturn their apparent dynamics, renegotiate the image bestowed upon them by "urban myths," and unlock what lies behind the captivating everyday life of its inhabitants, thus completing the re-mapping of a familiar "unknown" city in the most transparent manner.
Today:
«Kifissia, the living room»
Episode 5
Seemingly arbitrary verbal premises shape the acquaintance with different neighborhoods. Thomas Kiaos examines Kifissia as a living room. Agreeing that a living room defines the best - not according to personal but social dictates - room in the house, Kifissia becomes an opportunity to trace these social dictates and their evolution from the beginning of the previous century until today.
The shift of Kifissia from a countryside for a population of aristocrats, from a living room, in other words, a place of casual encounters, to a suburb of permanent residence for the new class of affluent Athenians that emerges in the 1980s, the parallel deforestation of the natural "decoration" of the landscape that goes from a living room of natural beauty to a living room of construction greed, the peak and fall of the local market that goes from a living room of luxury products to gradual abandonment - these are some of the axes of the narrative. Individuals connected to the space shape these abstract parameters into everyday reality. A young musician, privileged as he claims compared to his peers, a woman with a neoclassical house open to friends, the living room of a folk house in the anti-lifestyle Alonia of Kifissia, the public "living room" of the traditional coffee-pastry shop "Varsos" with its regular (mostly elderly) customers, all within half an hour, establish the basic ingredients of the area's "identity" and provide some emblematic interpretations of the living room's "decoration," certain fundamental aspects of Kifissia's image within an approximately century-long time lapse.
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