ORIANA & ALEKOS, CROSSFIRE OF LOVE
Fragmanlar
The stormy love story between the greatest Italian journalist of all time, Oriana Fallaci and the legendary Greek politician, poet and national hero Alekos Panagoulis through a turbulent period in the mid 70's.
A film about freedom, the human soul, the passion that grip a man and a woman as they attempt to deal with the highly charged issues of their own romance, while facing down a government prepared to grind them under the wheel.
A moving, true story, of love, passion, fight and poetry.
All started from an interview. An interview that joined the most temperament, the most explosive couple of the time. Alekos Panagoulis was a charming Greek revolutionist, a true hero, who fought with unique bravery. He was the symbol of freedom, the symbol of resistance in Europe in the 70's against a brutal military dictatorship. Oriana Fallaci was a brave, genius journalist and writer, a strict, pragmatic, beautiful woman and a loner. Their grand love story unfolds in the backdrop of a nation in turmoil. Oriana championed human rights and freedom, as Alexander Panagoulis did. Their meeting was also a political meeting, an intellectual meeting. This is what made the encounter and love so inevitable and so complicated and tragic.
Oriana Fallaci: "Sometimes a man enters your life mysteriously and without notice to change how you think and live, as he is always in your consciousness. This hero, Alekos, is such a man."
VISIONARY APPROACH
*Some of the scenes of the documentary film, were shot in the house in Athens-Greece where Alekos grew up and in Tuscany-Italy where Oriana and Alekos lived for a while. Rare archives, unpublished pictures, historic footage, letters, manuscripts and rare material, provide an unmatched window into Oriana's and Alekos' life together.
*All the visuals are narrative and metaphorical or allegorical re-enactments that rang emotionally true. Visual stories (b-roll) artistically styled and beautifully shot, that grab the audience both visually and audibly. Narrative scenes that do not always have literal connection to the soundbites, but have strong emotional resonance.
*You will never see the interviewee.
* The film turns remnants of footage into compelling narrative that speak volumes about powerful human experience. It's a lived experience captured in real time and reassembled to resonate in the present, bringing an unparalleled emotional weight, giving viewers a raw, unfiltered view into moments that might have otherwise been lost to time. History in 'Oriana & Alekos-Crossfire of Love' unfolds in the most real, human ways possible.
"That day he had the face of a Jesus crucified ten times", Oriana Fallaci wrote in 'Interviews with History'. "Neither the most atrocious tortures, nor the death sentence, nor three nights spent waiting to be shot, nor the most inhuman prison, five years in a concrete cell one and a half meters by three, had broken him"'.
That day and night in Athens, just two days after a general political amnesty had resurrected Alexandros Panagoulis from prison, Fallaci fell in love with him.
Panagoulis was the real thing: A hero who had been condemned to death for attempting to assassinate a dictator. He only regretted having failed. His portrait in 'Interviews with History' ends like this: "I am not a hero and I don't feel like a symbol…I am so afraid of disappointing all of you who see so many things in me! Oh, if only you could succeed in seeing in me only a man." "Alekos,"Fallaci says, "what does it mean to be a man?"
"It means to have courage, to have dignity. It means to love, without allowing love to become an anchor. It means to struggle and to win…And for you, what is a man?"
"I d say that a man is what you are, Alekos."
A hazardous three-year love affair, which survived personal and political violence, fear, and the scars that years of torture and solitary confinement had wrought on Panagoulis' mind as well as on his body.
Alekos Panagoulis was not an easy man to love. And almost from the beginning he was marked for assassination. In exile in Italy, he and Fallaci were spied on at dinner and in their bedroom; the telephone in their hotel room was tapped; horrifying attempts were made to force their car off the road .
After the junta fell in 1974, Panagoulis returned alone to Greece where he was elected to Parliament. Alekos and Oriana loved each other immensely until his mysterious end on May 1st 1976.
Adrianne Blue -The Washington Post-1980
Maria Giannouli Film Director
Trailer Cinematography Chronis Pechlivanidis-Stelios Pissas