FILM TREATMENT

MAIN STORY

The camera follows a writer as he rambles in crisis-stricken Athens searching for a long-lost friend, thusly discovering the inner life of the city streets in a metropolis full of contradictions and energy.

PLOT

K –our main character– is a writer. Recently, he often abandons his writing desk and goes down the city streets, wandering through the center of Athens. He feels that there, he will meet a mysterious person he was once close to, and has long vanished without leaving any trace behind. This person had a nickname, he was called: “The spider”.  K's hopes of finding him were renewed from the moment he saw the stamp of a spider among the many graffiti marks on the city walls. The significance this person had for K, makes him abandon the book he is writing and sink ever more into this quest, which leads to sinking even deeper into the streets. He wonders if the “spider” is now one of the many homeless in Athens, a marginal wanderer or even one of the thousands who desperately wander in the city at nights. K. has in his possession a few old photographs, showing the face of the “spider” – as he once was. 

K, divides the city into separate sections in planning his explorations and with the pictures in hand, he approaches several faces randomly on the street and asks them about the “spider”. The search does not seem to lead anywhere conclusively. K's flanerie brings to the surface several stories that circulate in the streets, urban myths, real events and fantasies born in the minds of the people he comes close to. Whatever information he collects, it will later prove to be unfounded. K. is lost in an urban maze.

Nevertheless, this search has already become the reason for K. to get to know and connect with some of these street characters. At the same time, he has begun to sense that, while he was the one initially observing the movements of the street people, in turn, he is now himself  the subject of observation by the city itself. 

One day K. attends a book presentation in which he was invited to talk. Suddenly, a man for the audience is addressing him publicly, asking him what he is looking for, and whether –in fact– is he not looking for his own identity in the city streets. The stranger tells K., he has been stalking him for a long time. At the end of the presentation, K., attempts to follow the unknown man who disappears in the streets of the Athens....

PROGRESS

Several hours of raw footage have been shot in the course of five years, and several characters –true people living in the streets of Athens– have been followed for an equal amount of time, comprising a living diary of the way Athens has been transformed through the last years. The individual human stories are blended together to form the manifold biography of the city.

TIME & LOCATION

Central Athens 2014–2017