Perdikaki / Περδικἀκι
2019
Duration 37 minutes
A film by Catriona Gallagher
Editing: Catriona Gallagher and Nikoleta Leousi
Musical composition and sound design: Alyssa Moxley
Featuring:
Maroula Antoniadou - The Kyria
Catriona Gallagher - The Narrator
John Bicknell - The Collector
World Premiere - 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 2020
Russian Premiere - New Holland Island Film Festival, August 2020 (Special Mention - Short Film Competition)
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A peripatetic narrative following the growth of the prolific yet overlooked weed perdikaki (περδικἀκι, pellitory-of-the-wall) through the urban landscape of Athens, Greece. As three characters search for meaning in the unassuming plant, their methods and objectives entangle. The Narrator’s search for the elderly woman first seen picking the plant, the Kyria, leads us through the empty and abandoned places of the city. As observations and findings accumulate, a shadow researcher, The Collector, emerges and the focus blurs: are we in pursuit of the elderly woman’s wisdom, or The Collector’s? and other than the symbolic plant do the other figures exist at all?
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I have passed over the olive line
the bright green of the north-west gives way
to the silver greens of the south-east
life's all about water after all
where there's abundant water the green is vibrant and vivid
where there's not the green darkens and silvers
they told me that this was the least green city in Europe
so I looked for the green wherever I could
and I found more than they would have led me to expect
they could not see the green at their feet
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Special Mention in the Short Film Competition of the New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival, August 2020:
'A poetic journey through the concrete cityscape of Athens in search of a mystery that may not exist, though the journey is no less real for it. Catriona Gallagher has a rare attentiveness to the environment: few directors, even those working in the travelogue essay genre, would be able to build an entire film around the search for an urban weed which everyone has seen but no one knows the name of. Here, poems, as Akhmatova wrote, grow shamelessly in trash.'
