The short film “Memoir of a Veering Storm” by Sofia Georgovassili premieres exclusively at onassis.org | Online Premiere: 12.04.2023 at 21:00

Anna, 15, is driven to the school gate on a summer morning by her mother just before a storm breaks. She sneaks out of school, and with the help of her boyfriend, they visit a hospital. There, she has to face an event that will jolt her into adulthood.

“I began writing ‘Memoir of a Veering Storm’ after a friend told me about an ‘accident’ he had when was 15, with a girl his own age. He described how two teens handled the situation. This account moved me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the cinematic possibilities of its cyclical narrative. That very night, I began writing the script, and the resulting short film was completed four years later.

In the film, a mother drives her teenage girl to school one morning, only to pick her again up a woman just hours later. The expanse covered by these eight school hours grows into the greatest distance of all: a lack of understanding and connection within a family setting. Even today, when I asked a small cross-section of teens how they felt about this issue, it became clear it is something they would struggle to tell their parents. They confided in me that they’d prefer it all happened without their parents ever finding out.

As I was writing the script, women began protesting in Poland, Hungary, Argentina, and, as it turns out, in Greece too, fighting for their inalienable right to bodily integrity – for the power to make choices about their own bodies. These events galvanized my determination to complete the film.

The film, however, seeks not to focus solely on the social impacts of such a story. Even though this issue remains taboo, and our constitutionally enshrined rights continue to be threatened by medieval attitudes.

I wanted ‘Memoir of a Veering Storm’ to stay true to its form – to observe and depict the repercussions such an experience has on the state of mind of a young girl who decides to go through it alone. On a day when a Mediterranean cyclone (a Medicane) threatens to strike Greece.”