The handmade cinema of Cyprus
Source: Cyprus Mail
‘If you don’t have something to say you’ll never be able to make movies,’ says one local storyteller with a wild streak who revels in absurdity
A phone alarm pings, and Adonis Florides gets up. Excuse me, he says briskly, there’s “something I have to do”. I wonder if he needs to take some pill or medication (he’s 65, after all) – but in fact he’s baking bread, and has to go stretch the dough. Our three-hour conversation is peppered with four such interruptions, by the end of which the bread has emerged from the Dutch oven and is ready to eat.
He bakes his own bread – not just today, but every day – and grinds his own coffee. His films are like that too, being part of “the handmade cinema that we make [in Cyprus],” he tells me. “Like lefkaritiko lace: stitch by stitch, that’s how we work.” His point is that this kind of cinema isn’t very commercial – but in fact his own films have vivid characters and strong, sometimes melodramatic plots. He has one movie (Africa Star) coming out next month – hopefully with English subtitles – and another (What We Did at Christmas, set during the troubles of 1963) in post-production, slated for release in 2025 or early 2026.
It sounds like he’s very prolific – but in fact he went 15 years between his first and second features, from Kalabush in 2002 to Rosemarie in 2017. One major reason for the hiatus – not the only reason: he did a lot of theatre in those years, and the economic crisis played a part too – was that he couldn’t find a producer, having produced Kalabush himself and vowed never to repeat the experience. His hair turned white in a single summer, he recalls, the summer of doing the accounts for the film – the budget was around £800,000 – and feeling overwhelmed by piles of receipts.
“Organisation isn’t really my forte, to be honest,” laughs Adonis, puffing on his pipe in the handsome old house in the centre of Limassol where he lives with his wife Sevina (plus, when she’s home from uni in Amsterdam, their 21-year-old daughter Irini) and an ageing cocker spaniel named Toffee. Producing isn’t really his thing. He’s also made some documentaries over the years – one on refugees for UNHCR, another for a bicommunal project – but he’s not really a documentarist either.
“I’m a storyteller,” shrugs Adonis – using the Greek word ‘paramythas’, which translates more as a teller of yarns and tall tales. “I’m interested in story, and I’m interested in the stuff I have in my head – and in my soul – coming out through my characters.”
His films are personal, stemming from the notions and emotions rooting around in his subconscious – but also inspired by his surroundings, and “stories I’ve heard” about others. (Rosemarie was, in that sense, almost autobiographical, its hero being a burned-out writer who turns his gaze on his dysfunctional neighbours.) Our three-hour chat teems with stories – yarns, tall tales, the wilder the better – ranging from the history of Limassol to Adonis himself and his extended family.
Thus, for instance, his paternal great-grandpa, a notorious nutter who took an axe to the record player because it was possessed by the Devil. That volatile great-grandpa was a miner, the ‘Flouris’ who later became ‘Florides’ – and ‘flouri’ means ‘money’ but in fact he got the name ironically, not because he was rich but because he was dirt-poor. This, too, is part of the story.
Then there’s the one about the cigarettes in 1963 – a story he adapted for his new film, but chose to tone down otherwise no-one would believe it.
This was during the intercommunal troubles, when his grandparents sheltered in a neighbour’s house and ran out of cigarettes – so they called out to the Turkish Cypriot living opposite and he threw them a pack, but it fell in the middle of the street between the houses, with roadblocks and snipers on both sides. This part is also in the movie – but he left out the next part, where the neighbours decided “to send the kid” to pick up the cigarettes. The kid was Adonis’ first cousin, a few months older than himself, meaning he was four years old in 1963. “They won’t hurt the kid,” reasoned the men. “Just in case, though, let’s tie him.” A rope was attached to the boy, and he duly retrieved the pack.
But the best part, says Adonis – shaking with laughter as we sit on the balcony, the centre of town unexpectedly quiet and pastoral – is that Theo (his cousin, ‘the kid’) and his family moved to Scotland soon after and indeed he’s Scottish now, wears a kilt, married to a Scottish woman, barely even speaks Greek.
“So the only memory he has of Cyprus is of being tied with a rope, so he could fetch some cigarettes from the middle of the street. And his big existential question – he always asks me this – is ‘Why did they tie me up?’.” Was it in case he got scared and ran – or more of a morbid precaution, to reel in his tiny corpse if a sniper shot him?
Adonis laughs, appreciating the absurdity – and probably the dark edge as well. His films, unusually for Cypriot cinema (which tends to be quite well-behaved), have a wild streak, dipping into madness and sleaze – and his life has a wilder side too, especially his younger life. He’s been a respected stalwart of the arts scene for 20 years now – but took a while to find himself before that, and got a bit lost in the process.
There was a short-lived first marriage, in his mid-20s (he and Sevina – the daughter of Turkish Cypriot intellectual Ibrahim Aziz – have been together since 1991). Before that, for about four years – the years when most young people go to university – he roamed around Europe doing odd jobs, having adventures and seething with so much anger he barely even spoke to his family in Cyprus, only contacting his brother now and then to confirm he was still alive.
He tells me a story from those years – the story of ‘Disorder’, a young Greek death-punk (Mohawk, pointy shoes, general freakish look) whom he met in Exarcheia. “Oi, mate,” were Disorder’s first words. “I’m going to Amsterdam, wanna come?”
They set out together, hitching rides with truck drivers. Disorder had an irrational fear of wolves, and would always chat to the drivers lest they grew bored and dumped their passengers in a forest full of wolves. In Belgrade, they crashed with one of Adonis’ friends. Disorder drank all her cough medicine and accidentally tore his sleeping bag, filling the flat with feathers – then, feeling guilty, cleaned it from top to bottom.
In Amsterdam, the duo were separated. Disorder fell into a canal while fleeing the cops, and spent weeks in hospital. Adonis was robbed and beaten up by skinheads, wandered the city for a while battered and bleeding, stole a bottle of milk and swigged it like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows – then found himself being followed by a young African man, whom he initially rebuffed out of residual racism.
Don’t be afraid, said the man, and asked where he was from. Cyprus, admitted our hero. “My friend!” beamed the African. “You know what is my name? My name is Makarios!” It turned out he was Kenyan, a product of the post-colonial friendship from the Archbishop’s day. Makarios put him up, then lent him money to get to London. As for Disorder, he was spotted again in Exarcheia five years later – no longer a punk but now a model, fresh off the ad campaign for a fax-paper company.
It’s a somewhat random sort of story – but that’s the point, the randomness of life when lived in the raw, so to speak, without any guardrails, bringing experience and leaving a person more interesting, with ‘something to say’. “At the end of the day,” he opines, “if you don’t have something to say, you won’t be able to make movies.”
Adonis doesn’t just make movies. He also directs plays, writes poetry, plays music – anything to scratch the creative itch that’s always gnawed at him. (He’s always had something to say.) As a child he’d stage shadow-puppet shows, a Cypriot karagiozis, using cardboard figures cut out from magazines. But he’s also an activist, having spent much of 2024 organising with United for Palestine – and also something of an expert on Limassol, being part of the generation who’ve seen it all, from goats in the empty fields behind the Lanitio to skyscrapers in today’s ravaged city centre. “Every time I see another old building gone in the city, I feel like a piece has been torn from me.”
1974 was his turning point, both the year when his parents divorced (hence his anger in adolescence) and the year when refugees descended on Limassol, doubling the population overnight and triggering the slow transformation from the magical place of his childhood.
It does sound magical, like something from a seaside Tom Sawyer. “Swimming out to the barges, fishing for octopuses, spending hours in our canoes, stealing Aresti’s boat and sailing to the big ships so they’d throw us cigarettes…”
His parents were upwardly mobile (his mum owned “the first boutique in Limassol”), but didn’t seem to mind some boyish larks. Adonis recalls himself at eight years old, in the mid-60s, naked except for a swimsuit, clambering over the (few) cars on his way to spend the whole day at the beach with fellow urchins. “Tourists would pass and we’d yell out: ‘Please, one piastre, splash!, water’” – pointing to the sea – “so they’d toss in a coin and we could dive for it”.
Adonis Florides doesn’t go out much anymore (at least not for fun; he’s out all the time when staging plays or making movies), and tries to avoid the new developments altogether. The marina looks like a mall, he sighs. The towers are right on the beach – when they really could be anywhere; it’s not like their super-rich residents would lose their sea view – the whole thing reeks of “incredible greed”. He’d rather stay home, cooking for friends. The music is too loud in most places anyway.
Stories swirl around him, ripen and ferment in his subconscious – then occasionally rise to the surface, hitching a ride on his Muse to become ideas for more ‘handmade’ cinema.
“I’m torn between being an introvert and an extrovert,” he replies when I ask about his personality. “I’m talkative, I’m open with people… But, on the other hand, I have such a good time by myself – shut up in a room, writing, reading, playing music and so on”.
Unlike some directors, he’s not dictatorial on a film set – in fact, he insists, he’s not a natural leader at all. What he does seem to have is a wry sense of humour (his study, where he does all his writing, is adorned with a photo of the Marx Brothers), a love of yarns, and a gift for taking people as they are. “If I fight with someone – in the theatre or whatever, it’s happened a couple of times – I won’t sleep for a week. I feel bad, even if it’s not my fault… I like things to run smoothly.”
It’s an odd contradiction, that affable smoothness alongside the wild streak and tinge of angry activism. Then again, if he were simple, he probably wouldn’t be an artist at all. Art fills a role in his life – maybe as a way of making sense of a changing city, maybe a channel for emotion, like the travelling he did to expend his rage as a young man, or maybe just a way of saying ‘I was here’, especially as one grows older.
There’s a quote by Kazantzakis, he says (without necessarily agreeing 100 per cent with it): “A man should plant at least one tree, have at least one child, and write at least one book”. I planted that tree there, muses Adonis lightly, gazing out at his garden, I have a kid – actually two; there’s also Doros, his stepson by Sevina’s first husband – I’ve written poems and scripts galore. “I’m happy.” That bread he baked wasn’t half-bad either.
The original article: belongs to Cyprus Mail .
