Venice Film Festival 2022 | Interview with Giulia Amati, director of Kristos, the Last Child

Kristos is an endangered species: the only child on the small island of Arki, Greece. As such, the whole village worries about him and his future. What will he do now that primary school is almost over? Pulled into antithetical directions by those he loves the most, Kristos tries to find his way around Dodecaneso’s breathtaking landscapes, with dogs and goats as only companions. Kristos, The Last Child was presented at the Giornate degli Autori, during the 79^th Venice Film Festival. On this occasion, Italian French director Giulia Amati shared with Universal Cinema her thoughts about Cinema del Reale and the hardship of finding one’s voice.

Giulia Amati (GA): I am about to leave Athens after two years and there is always a little bit of sadness when you need to let go of something. But there is also great joy since you accomplished it, and you can finally see something that was just in your head. I am at the end of a deep journey.

Giulia Dickmans, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Let’s start from the beginning then. How did you come up with the idea for Kristos?

(GA): I know the island of Arki since I was a child, I was going there with my family to sailing. Then, many years later, I went back with a friend who is a journalist and who sent me an article about Kristos. That’s when I decided to go and meet him. For one year I just developed the project, I learned Greek, created my relationship with everybody, and wrote the story. I got to know people better and only then I started shooting. Every month I was going to Arki for a bit, to shoot, and then came back to Athens.

(UM): Would you say Kristos is a documentary?

(GA): This is a good question. In Italian we call this Cinema del Reale, maybe you can translate it with cinema of reality? It’s a language that I really like. It’s the direction in which I’m going to explore more and more in the future. Is this specific intersection where fiction and reality meet. In this dimension, you have a strong directing point of view, therefore in a way it is more creative, cinematographically speaking, although the story is totally real. A lot of people commonly say I do documentaries but this is not quite the case. I don’t do the thing with the voiceover, interviewing people, and delivering information in a very direct way. Of course, I’m not the only one doing the Cinema del Reale. There is a bunch of people doing that thing, it has a long tradition to it. If you look at the very origin of making documentaries, you have this observational perspective, they were not informative like we understand documentaries nowadays, which comes from the news tradition. This is what I consider the most far away from my work, which doesn’t come from the need to explain reality. It’s rather the need of observing reality and immerse yourself in it. I think this desire is at the very origin of the pure way of making documentaries. It’s about living the life of other people and spending time there, getting to know them, and stopping approaching things from an intellectual point of view. Reality is more about experiencing it than understanding it.

(UM): By watching Kristos you experience his reality, but you also perceive it is filtered by someone. Your strong directing is evident. And this is not quite the objective point of view that you would expect from a traditional documentary. Therefore, I wonder how much freedom Kristos had. Did he have some agency? How hard was it for you to find a key to access Kristos and then explore a language he could express himself with?

(GA): This mix between this kind of anthropological observation and strong cinematographic grammar together creates a genre of documentary to which I think Kristos probably belongs. The question you’re asking is a very sensitive one. I’ve learned a lot from Kristos, although I had already worked with children in the past, by doing workshops with them. I was already accustomed to issues like attention span and how to allow kids to enter the game in a way that makes sense for them. And with Kristos, we went along from the very beginning. We clicked and that worked well until the very end. But the project became challenging for me when I brought the crew in, even if it was a small one. Until that point, it was just me and him, and it was a very intimate game we were doing. When I brought other people I was worried about how Kristos would react. It took a little time to reset the game. To have him back with the same intensity, but with filters, so to speak. And at one point with the director of photography, we had to figure out how to film Kristos. Because he had to film him at his height, his speed and it wasn’t easy. So, at first, I asked Kristos to slow down a little bit. But then I soon realized that I could not direct Kristos too much because he is a child and by interfering, I would have killed his energy — which was precisely the beauty in him. As soon as I realized that, I agreed with the DOP that I could talk to Kristos and give him some directions, but only until we started filming, then I needed to let go. And it was hard, also because he is a very generous child and many times, we were very empathic and felt like interacting, as there were many scenes we were living while filming. For example, the last scene is so intense that we all wanted to hug him, but we had to control ourselves.

(UM): I think you did a great job in showing the tension Kristos lives in every day. But it is very hard to understand what he thinks, and what he wants. Do you know? He never speaks his mind in the movie.

(GA): Einstein was saying that you cannot solve a problem from the space where it originates from. I believe this is always the case, and it is similar to the bond that links us to our families. We are all trapped in a cage. And the solution is not within the cage but in stepping out. And once you step out, then you might go back. Having solved the problem. And I think this is exactly Kristo’s situation. Especially because his family is the 30 people of the village. It’s a big family!  Two are probably the reasons why he cannot express himself. First, because he is not used to talking, he never had other children to talk to, so he didn’t practice that in his daily life, for the first 10 years of his existence. So why should we expect language to be his main way of expressing himself? However, he can do a great job with his eyes, with his connection with the animals, who understand him, and vice versa. This is what he can do because he has been trained for that. And the second reason is that he is a child living on this very small island within a very patriarchal family and society. So, it’s not easy to step out of what people are expecting from you. On the one hand, his father; on the other, the teacher. Probably we will be able to hear Kristos’s point of view only in a few years when he will eventually come back and have more experiences than all the other people on the island. Then maybe he would be strong enough to express his point of view.

(UM): So the father figure is a key to the story? You not only dedicate the movie to your father but also Kristos writes about his father in his school assignments and argues he wants to become like him one day.

(GA): This movie was an intimate journey for me, as my father died when we started shooting in Arki, which was kind of our island. But I don’t think I was projecting that on the movie. As I got to know Michalis, Kristo’s father, I felt it was a great opportunity to work on myself parallel to the shooting. Because the figure of Michalis tested me a lot. Somehow Kristos and I were on a parallel path. I believe art is therapy for some people, and definitely for me. Every time I finish a movie, I have changed from the way I was at the outset.

(UM): And what do you think is maybe a fil rouge throughout all your work? Your previous productions were more of a choral narration and took place in emergency settings.

(GA): Now that you ask, maybe the fact that I always worked in a microcosm. The kind of location and also that I always tell stories developing in one specific time in one precise place. I’m not choosing that consciously, but now I try to understand the reasons behind my choices better. At the very beginning, I was totally unaware. I was just falling in love with some projects. I had the urge to tell a story and then little by little, I realized that I really empathize with people who “don’t have a voice”. In a way, Kristos is a work of maturity because when I started the project, it was the first time I was fully aware of the deep reasons behind it, even though I was able to articulate it only by the end of the movie. For this movie I also decided to work in an easier environment, not a war zone or such because I just wanted to be able to have a full crew, to have a nice setting in which I could really explore the cinematographic language. Kristos is the result of this conscious desire.