13/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The Greek director breaks down his film, which he describes as both happy and sad, and which says a lot about his devasted home country

In Our Wildest Days [+see also:
interview: Vasilis Kekatos
film profile], a drama screening in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus strand, Vasilis Kekatos follows Chloe, who leaves her violent home and Athens behind, starting a new life with a bunch of kids just like her: angry, lost and free.

Cineuropa: Your film looks beautiful, but it’s actually very sad. You can’t be fooled by this wonderful summer: disappointment follows this group around everywhere they go.
Vasilis Kekatos: It’s a sad world, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. These “Lost Boys” – because let’s call them that – know that the end is near. Their days of wandering are not going to last. For now, they swim, flirt and love each other. But the end is approaching. It’s the first time I’m realising it and the first time someone has pointed it out, so I won’t be too intellectual about it. It’s a sad film, but it’s also a happy one. And it says so much about my devasted country.

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It does, especially in the little exchanges with the strangers they meet. One of them says: “Why would someone be ashamed that life was hard on them?” Life is hard on everyone here.
They are creating their own reality, but in this vast sea of youth, there are also little islands of grief. I thought of these scenes as small rhapsodies: they meet someone and learn about their lives. The man who talks about the mines actually used to work there – his town will be in tatters now because the factory changed hands. Some of these people were actors, some weren’t.

I wrote the first draft of the script five or six years ago. In Europe – and especially in the Balkans – that’s how long it takes to make a film. It was very structured and very American [laughs]. A year before the shoot, I was travelling around Greece and realised I had to change everything: I needed to talk about the places I saw. They really moved me. When these two girls are saying they’re ghosts, that’s what I felt. Those towns are like ghost towns. People still live there, but you don’t know if they are alive. To be honest with you, I need to go back and make a proper film about them. Right now, I’ve made one about driving through them. I need to understand what the hell happened there. These people haunt me.

You’re driving through them because these kids are escaping their own families. Why were you interested in that?
You need a strong reason to leave your home. Most of us carry on with our lives and never do anything extraordinary. When something pushes you past your limits, you are freer. I wanted to show free people. They are, again, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. They wanted to leave because their parents wouldn’t let them sleep as long as they wanted. Sometimes, they think about their childhood bedrooms and feel nostalgic about it, but you can also create your own home down the road.

You have affection for them. You’re tender even when showing sex, even though in films with younger protagonists, it’s often violent or awkward.
We see this girl and this boy, and their language is body language. They’re closer to animals in that sense. A friend of mine watched one of the first cuts and said: “This scene is like National Geographic.” [laughs] They want to connect, and they’re attentive to each other, but it’s a positive experience precisely because it’s primal. They’re like animals, like kids, like grownups. It all comes together.

With Chloe, her family’s language was violence. This is what she gets from life. Another slap from your family member can be a starting point, though, because you realise that if people are violent, they shouldn’t be in your life. She knows it’s not okay. But she has to experience tenderness and love in order to really understand it.

They know this journey has to end, as you mentioned. It makes it nostalgic, but doesn’t nostalgia belong to older people instead?
They’re not that young. They’re right on the edge, in their late twenties, the same age I was when I wrote the film. When I tried to convince people to finance the movie, I was telling them: “I have to make this film NOW. Right now, that’s how I feel.” When you’re 22 or 23, you don’t give a shit about anything. But a few years later, you go: “Am I going to have a family? Kids? Am I going to find a job? Who am I right now?” This last question lies at the centre of every revolution.

Before, unless you’re a very smart person or a very serious person, you never wonder about that; you just live day by day. And then you do, and it’s the end of your wildest days. When I was making the film, I could sleep for an hour and continue shooting. We went from town to town, talked and swam all night. Now, I have asthma. Shit got real very fast. I am so happy I made it in this carefree way. If I’d started now, it would have been completely different.