/// MAKING OF ///
/// THE STORY ///
Greece is dancing on a small line if or if not it might remain in the Eurozone, if it goes bankrupt or not. One big European conference is following the other. It’s big politics that rule the public perception of the crisis in Greece right now. But what about the people? How does the crisis affect daily lives and how is it not only changing the financial situation of Greece’s people, but also their whole approach to life? What are the personal stories of the crisis?
The stories that not focus on big numbers, big problems, big needs are seldom to be found at the big arenas of political interest, but at the average person. Their stories tell the ‘real’ story of Greece, the stories that will be part of the success or failure in dealing with the crisis. Those are the stories that we try to tell with ‘Stories of a Crisis’.
/// THE CONCEPT ///
The concept for ‘Stories of a Crisis’ in it’s core is simple. We want to tell multimedia stories of people from Greece and how they deal with the crisis and how it changes their lives. In addition the photography will allow to also publish the stories in other contexts. For the more complex stories additional interactive web features will get developed to tell a even more in depth story.
When I started developing the concept what later became our project ‘Stories of a Crisis’ one of the biggest challenges was to figure out what stories could be interesting without falling into the trap of going to the extremes. There are many stories from Greece and some are spectacular, but also not always very representative. We needed to find stories that would both tell a story of someone in Greece without the extremes, but somehow representative for what is happening in Greece.
The first step that we figured out was that it would be essential to get someone on the ground in Greece who could research contacts and interesting stories. We knew that our time would be limited to two weeks in Greece what made clear that with our goals we would need a good preparation to record the stories. Luckily Stavros Makris, from Athens himself, is an avid photographer in it’s own means and he was more than happy to be part of the project. He became the essential fixer on the ground that could organize, translate and photograph and film himself. Second addition to the team was Yann Verbeke, a brilliant young filmmaker from Belgium. As we knew about the complexity of the stories we decided that an additional shooter would be great to have more space free for keeping track on storylines and getting the stories right.
Over the course of two weeks we recorded three stories, dealing with education, art and small businesses, doing personal stories of individuals.
SIMON STICKER
concept, director, filming, photography, editor
YANN VERBEKE
DoP, photography, editor
STAVROS MAKRIS
logistics, translation, photography, making of
