Well Kept Secrets: Athanasia

Epirus, province of Pogoni, on the borderline with Albania. Emigration and a sense of death scattered in the air, in the light. Few are left. Human figures that look as if they were part of the landscape. In a place surrounded by mountains: polyphonic songs. The silences, the pauses between the voices and the music that stream out of the soil. Through the cross of personal voices, that of parti, giristi, klosti and isocrati, a collective harmony emerges. The film strives to grasp the rhythm of the soul of Epirus.

Nicolas is a shepherd. He is around twenty years old, thin and spirited. Constantina is eighteen years old. Constantina fell in love with Nikolas the very first time she saw him with his lyre at the bull sacrifice ritual. She entered the whirlpool of ecstasy and became his lover. Their relationship was clearly physical, all other things were setting them apart. Constantina decides that they should break up. "We come from different places and head in different directions", she says. When she finds out that she is pregnant, she does not tell Nikolas.

Centres on two brothers, Stelios and Yannis. The impulsive Stelios skips their small town, deserts from the army, and is thought dead, until Yannis, now a city cop, recognizes his name on the papers of an illegal immigrant seaman. He begins a search for his lost brother, a search that takes him across many borders: between past and present, between Greece and its neighbouring countries, between one identity and another.

A minefield by the Evros River. The border. A platoon of sappers are struggling to clear it. Yannis is among them. Gangs transfer immigrants and refugees across the border-river. Sometimes the minefield breaks its dark silence. Chryssa, who takes the children across, will stumble on Yannis. Challenging death is their common fate. She will be lost. Yannis will stay behind trying to understand what love is, through a miracle.

It is on Ascension Day that Zoe, a brilliant computer analyst, visits the National Park in the center of Athens with her daughter, Katerina. That afternoon in the park, Zoe experiences an overwhelming array of instinctive compulsions and transforms into an ancient Maenad in ecstatic frenzy, even capable of murder. Instincts and animals get loose and panic takes over.

The truth behind the mysterious murder of Loula, a sexy young Greek woman, is gradually revealed by a documentary film crew investigating the case. What they discover is a tale of ambition, passion and betrayal.