The Apaches of Athens

Athens in the 1930s was a capital in bloom. The so-called “1930s Generation” of painters, poets and intellectuals were putting their modernist stamp on Greek art and literature; the city’s contours had yet to be ravaged by mass post-war development. Travel back to this golden cultural age as an historic Greek film of 1930s Athens, thought to be lost for decades, is brought back into the light and screened for the public at the SNFCC. The Apaches of Athens freeze frames significant Athenian landmarks and 1930s everyday life in urban neighbourhoods including Plaka, Psirri, Thissio, Gazi, Syntagma Square and Panepistimiou—as well as the former royal palace of Tatoi (see it in its stately heyday). Based on a legendary Greek operetta of 1921, Apaches of Athens was the first attempt to create a “singing and sound” film in Greece and stars notable figures of the Greek music scene. The film, which premiered in Athens in 1930, was discovered in the Cinémathèque Française archive and has been restored from positive nitrate print with French sub-titles. It will be screened to the accompaniment of live music, in place of the work’s original—and forever lost—soundtrack. Cinephiles will love this reclaimed historic link to earliest Greek cinema.