This documentary from Angelos Kovotsos guides us nostalgically through pre-1922 Izmir and its famous waterfront, a narrow strip of land on which a great civilization developed thanks to the coexistence of different nations, languages and mentalities that formed a distinct cultural alloy expressed in business, art, everyday life. Kovotsos’ film is based on the book ‘The Smyrna Quay’ by George Poulimenos and Achilleas Chatziconstantinou. The book involved painstaking research that involved creating dossiers of information about buildings and tenants gleaned from sources that included newspapers, travel guides, and public and private archives, and then digitally reconstructing the facades of more than 200 buildings from Izmir’s famous kordonboyu. Kovotsos’s film reveals the details of this process, combining it with images of the Smyrna of the past and the Izmir of the present, and interviews with members of some of the old Smyrniot families still living in the city of Izmir.
Angelos Kovotsos studied Cinematography at the Stavrakou Film School and Economics at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Since 1991, he has written and directed over 100 films for television (mainly public) and cinema, with an emphasis on environmental, architectural, historical and cultural documentaries. Kovotsos has been awarded three times at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival for his films ‘Mediterranean Ethria and Electric Leviathan’ from the ERT series ‘Portraits and Routes of Greek Architects’ (2007), ‘Encardia – The Dancing Stone’ (2012), and ‘Stringless’ (2018).
