Still: Pigeons are dying when the city is on fire - Stavros Markoulakis

“My intention from very early on was to create a love letter to everything that has survived from the past but not necessarily following the conventional or academic way of creating a narrative story,” Netherlands-based Greek director Stavros Markoulakis says of his philosophical and challenging Pigeons are dying when the city is on fire, which is, in equal part, lyrical, melancholy, vertiginous and sensual, as well as being steeped in metaphor. The short film is selected for International Competition at Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Fest.

Set over the course of a single day, the hottest day of the year, two young male adults watch the sun rise over downtown Athens. They go to one of their apartments, fuck for the first time, and then capture a pigeon that has become trapped in their bedroom. Later they drive around Athens at breakneck pace on a scooter, the bird contained in a pot for release at the end of the day. The city is baking so the men cool off, gambol and kiss in a public fountain, together with a (possibly imagined) troupe of queer couplings. 

In a twilight ending which can be interpreted in many ways, the bird is released, or is it? Has one of the man also escaped the domination of the other? Or is the overall experience part of a cosmic continuum that links time, present and future and memory? As one of the protagonists observes in narration, when he was a boy the rising sun would warm his face every morning, and then he would wake up, but now only the hottest day of the year can replicate that feeling of childhood. 

Director Markoulakis explains further how the concept of memory pervades the whole film.

“It started from the point of how are we dealing with our everyday interactions in relation to our feelings, how do we connect with people? How do we connect and disconnect with moments consciously or unconsciously throughout our lifetime? What remains in our memory and how do we reflect on that?”

Throughout the film, Markoulakis offers a series of tableaux, both delicious and dynamic, using a range of lenses, overlaying images, zooming in and out and shooting upside-down as the pair hurtle around Athens on their bike. The sound design heightens the sense of disorientation within a soundscape whereby we are never sure which of the two men’s narrations are being relayed to us.

Markoulakis has been living and working between the Netherlands and Greece for the past 7 years, as he is also part of IFFR's and Leiden Shorts' team, and notes significant differences in the approaches to life in Western Europe and the East, especially among youth, as illustrated within his Athens-based film, which is a co-production with the Netherlands (co-produced by nami films).

“I am striving to be an optimistic person. And I think I generally am, but I feel that the western capitalistic way of living is growing to a very, very suffocating extent at this point,” he says.

“You wake up in the morning, you have to work for eight hours, five days a week at least, then you have to go to the gym, then you have to take care of yourself with skincare, therapies, everything, all these things… and in the end, interactions and love connections become another task on a calendar or become a daily behaviour of two hours scrolling on a Tinder or a Grindr account.”

In his film, Markoulakis offers an altogether more tactile, at times libertarian, but essentially more human alternative. Two lovers in a state of bliss question their world beneath a blazing sun. They may be poor and therefore unable to escape to Ibiza or one of the Greek islands on the hottest day of the year, but even within those fleeting hours they are looking to explore different possibilities, create different narratives and look to understand their lot on the planet.

And there isn’t an iPhone in sight.

Find the Dutch line-up at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival here. Or discover the festival on https://clermont-filmfest.org/en/global/home/