Dimitris Stavrakas

Dimitris Stavrakas was born in Athens in 1938. He studied at the Stavrakou Film School, and from 1958 to 1963 he worked as an assistant director on various Greek film productions. Between 1961 and 1963 he also wrote about cinema as a critic for the magazine Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης (Art Review) and the newspaper Δημοκρατική Αλλαγή (Democratic Change). His first short film, Το γκάζι (The Gas), dates from 1966.

In 1967 he left for Paris, where he worked as a camera operator until 1968. He then turned to the social sciences. From 1969 to 1972 he studied sociology at the University of Nanterre, and from 1972 to 1974 population statistics at the Sorbonne’s demographic institute, also gaining a master’s diploma in city planning there.

Stavrakas returned to Greece in 1975. He worked on television productions, wrote film criticism for the magazine Αντί, and from 1980 to 1982 directed a number of television programmes. Alongside this work he made short and feature films as well as documentaries for television. In 2019 the Thessaloniki International Film Festival included him in its Greek Queer Cinema tribute, presenting his biography and screening Betty again for a new audience.

Μπέττυ (Betty, 1979) is a short hybrid of fiction and documentary, about half an hour long, based on the autobiography of Betty Vakalidou, who plays herself. It follows twenty-four hours in the life of an Athenian trans woman, as memories of her earlier life mix with the present day until evening. According to the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the Thessaloniki competition rejected the film because of its subject, but a special screening was warmly received. The next season it opened in cinemas before Federico Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal. In 1979 it won a best short film award at the Drama Short Film Festival and a best documentary award at the Larissa festival.

His first feature, Η παρεξήγηση (The Misunderstanding), followed in 1983. Το καναρινί ποδήλατο (The Canary Yellow Bicycle, 1999) is a Greek-language social drama. Aris, a newly appointed teacher, takes over the sixth grade at a public school in Athens and notices Lefteris, a pupil others dismiss, who has put together his own bicycle. When the boy runs away to his grandfather’s village, Platamonas, Aris finds him on the beach. The film won the second prize for a fiction feature and, for Dimitris Alexandris, the best actor award at the 1999 State Film Awards. Το πέρασμα (The Crossing, 2006) follows a young man from Bangladesh who tries to build a life in Greece.

Betty has returned to audiences through the restoration programme Motherland, I See You and screenings at Thessaloniki festivals. The film-maker Christos Dimas has named it as one of only two Greek films with trans characters made before his own 1997 short Tender. The Chania Film Festival has also screened The Canary Yellow Bicycle. For a learner, the 1999 film offers concrete Greek: a school, a teacher, a pupil, a bicycle and the sea. Choose the scene in which Lefteris runs away and Aris finds him on the beach. Describe it in three short sentences of your own, for example: Ο Λευτέρης φεύγει (Lefteris leaves). Πηγαίνει στο χωριό (He goes to the village). Ο δάσκαλος τον βρίσκει στην παραλία (The teacher finds him on the beach). These are practice sentences, not dialogue from the film.

• He trained at Athens’ Stavrakou Film School, whose name closely resembles his own.
• Before his first feature, he studied sociology and population statistics in Paris.
• Betty opened in Greek cinemas before Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal.
• In The Canary Yellow Bicycle, the pupil Lefteris has assembled his own bicycle.