The book and the film “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens” on a United States and Canada tour

The film “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens,” directed by Tassos Langis and Yiannis Gaitanidis and produced by the Onassis Foundation, continues its festival journey around the world for another year. Following its premiere in the Competition Section of the Athens International Film Festival – Opening Nights in September 2021, and after its selection for the Iris Awards by the Hellenic Film Academy, the “builders and housewives” of Athens traveled to the other side of the Atlantic, winning the Best Film Award at Cinema Urbana – Architecture Film Festival Brasilia in Brazil, in August 2022. This season the documentary will be presented in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, Chicago, Chile, Lund and Rotterdam.

In the directors’ words, “Athens is our city, the place we were born and live, and we love it as if it were our own ‘village.’ However, at the same time, Athens is full of contradictions and remains practically unknown, mostly because the repetitive texture of the apartment buildings multiplies in clones. The space spreads out like a text: impenetrable in its general tone, incomprehensible, lacking any apparent historical referents – except for the Acropolis landmark and a few scattered, disconnected monuments. Someone might wonder how all this was built – it was certainly not by architects and urban planners. Using Ioanna Theocharopoulou’s book as a starting point and guide, we delved into the cracks of our modern urban history to trace the internal immigrants who were the ‘co-authors’ of our built environment. We started from the same biases: the conviction that those were the people who destroyed Athens, the failure of Konstantinos Karamanlis’s ‘antiparochi’ system, etc.). We can’t tell if these biases and myths around Athens will cease to exist. But we do know that another narrative has been added up, a story about the creation of Europe’s oldest new capital.” A film that won over the Athenian audience is now ready to conquer the world.

Ioanna Theocharopoulou’s book of the same title, “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens,” where the documentary was based, is launching its third revised edition by Onassis Publications at Archtober, New York City’s annual architecture and design festival, and will be available for purchase in different cities during the ADFF screenings (in the Unites States and Canada); it returns ‘home’ at the Onassis Stegi on November 24, 2022, for the official launch of its publication in Greek and a conversation with the author Ioanna Theocharopoulou, the filmmakers Tassos Langis and Yiannis Gaitanidis, the Director of Culture at the Onassis Foundation Afroditi Panagiotakou, the architect and scientific advisor of the film Panos Dragonas, and anthropologist Michael Herzfeld at the Upper Stage of the Onassis Stegi.