The Old Man and the Aegean Sea

The highly successful Greek Film Festival 2024 in Sydney has finished with the premiere screening of The Aegean, a movie shot on the idyllic Greek island of Kythera but with an underlying message that still resonates in today’s turbulent times.

The mood of the film is set early on when a young Congolese refugee befriends an old widowed fisherman who provides him shelter and the opportunity to work on his fishing boat.  Theodoros, the young boy, is enthralled by the Old Man’s library of books and one book in particular, “The Old Man and the Sea”, by Ernest Hemingway, a classic work which earned the famed American writer the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

By way of artistic licence, this writer has adapted Ernest Hemingway’s famous opening lines:

He was an old man who fished alone in a boat in the Aegean and he had many days barely taken a fish. Then a young boy appeared.  It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his boat practically empty.   The old man had deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the azure sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.  Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. 

“Hector,” the boy said to him in the alleys of the quaint fishing village of Kapsali.  “I can come with you. We’ll catch more fish.  We will make more money. I am the hardest worker ever. Fastest worker too.  Please sir.” 

It turns out that Theodoros was a survivor of a shipwreck off the Messinian coast in western Greece in July 2023 that saw an overcrowded boat carrying up to 750 asylum seekers and  refugees sink with heavy loss of life and few survivors and in circumstances that drew the ire of international observers.

Theodoros has lost everything and now finds himself as an outsider seeking refuge on a small Greek island in the Aegean.  He is eager to assist Hector and in so doing help himself and escape the clutches of a sinister gangland figure, Christos, who lurks in the background.

The Old Man with his traditional walking stick negotiates the narrow alleys of Hora and Kapsali and the rocky pathways leading to the port.  Almost every morning at dawn the man who was born to be a fisherman embarks on a fishing odyssey into the Aegean on his beloved fishing boat, the Ioannis II.

And ever present is the image of Hytra, the small rocky islet opposite Kapsali, that rises almost pyramid-like out of the wine-dark sea.

At first Hector’s catch is modest and the local Kytherian fishmonger takes advantage of the old man by offering him a pittance.  But things start to change with the young man now onboard.  The entrepreneurial spirit of young Theodoros prevails and soon the old man and his young protégé enjoy the monetary spoils of their enhanced fishing catches.

Kythera is captured in all its splendiferous glory.

We catch glimpses of many of the island’s natural and man-made attributes, including sweeping landscapes, the vibrant town of Potamos, the island’s endless winding roads, lush vegetation, the British-built, Gothic-styled Lancastrian school of Milapidea, the picture-postcard  bay of Avlemonas, the rugged hillsides and the spectacular sunsets.

Theodoros’ passion for reading is captured as he walks blissfully past the stunning 200-year-old 12 arched stone viaduct - built in the hamlet of Katouni during the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands - whilst engrossed in the Hemingway novel.

The Old Man’s house overlooks the bay of Kapsali but for cinematic purposes they occasionally emerge from the spectacular church of St John the Baptist built into the rocky outcrop above the picturesque bay.

But The Aegean is not a travelogue.  It is what lies beneath that really matters.

The pair’s newfound financial ‘freedom’ disguises a mental anguish that torments both of them.

Hector, who has lost his entire family, is beholden to a dangerous elixir of drink and prescription drugs whilst young Theodoros, who lost his family and friends in the deadly shipwreck off Pylos, is still haunted by their screams and thrashing about in the cruel seas.

The Old Man is lonely, reminiscing of happier days, of his late wife Helena and their daughter Olivia, swimming at Avlemonas against the backdrop of the centuries old Venetian castella. Hector’s estranged daughter is ever present in his mind and in his dreams and he is afflicted by their separation.

For Theodoros, the mental scars from the shipwreck are barely beneath the surface.  When he goes out to sea he is haunted by the images of his dead relatives and friends. He has a fascination for the shipwrecks at Diakofti and one in particular, the wreck of the L’Istanbul that is close to shore and which obviously revives bitter memories of the overladen boats attempting the perilous journey across the Mediterranean carrying refugees and forced migrants.

At one point Theodoros crouches over the rocks near the port of Diakofti that witnessed the catastrophic sinking of an asylum vessel in 2022 with the loss of a dozen lives and the famous rally to arms by the locals who with the assistance of a large mobile crane managed to lift scores of tortured souls to safety up the calamitous rock face.

The movie’s director, Jacob Richardson, a Brisbane-based filmmaker, in his notes for his debut film wrote:

“When I decided to tackle this film, I was encouraged by many to shoot it at home in Australia. (But) The Aegean lives and breathes on a small island called Kythera, off the Aegean and Ionian Seas. Like the great renaissance sculptors of old who believed that their artwork lay within a specific block of marble and who spent years searching for it, The Aegean lay on this tiny little Greek island, and our job was to go there and cut away the excess to reveal the story beneath.”

Working with cinematographer Oliver Hay, Richardson has been able, in his own words, to “infuse a wonderful dreamlike quality and an old-world stillness to the island” and draw out great performances from the lead actors, Costas Mandylor (as Hector), Nicky Dune (Theodoros) and the Greek rapper Light (Christos).

Filming on the island was also a challenge, particularly when it came to closing roads for production purposes. However, a chance meeting at a local café with the chief of police soon resolved that and, indeed, the filmmakers found that the ‘small town’ community feel really helped because all the locals were on board.

And how does the film respond?  Spoiler alert.

Hector finally comes to terms with his self-inflicted misery and alcohol dependency.

Hector defiantly tells the gangster that Theodoros is now “my boy” and his redemption is complete.

Theodoros is made to feel that he belongs in this small Aegean community by Hector who in turn learns to re-embrace a society that he was all but prepared to abandon.  After all, the Old Man of the Aegean Sea is indomitable.

And, as Hemingway reminds us, man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

In the final reckoning, the radiance of the spirit prevails in this idyllic Aegean environment.

George Vardas is the Arts and Culture Editor of Greek City Times and a proud Kytherian.  The images used in this article (unless otherwise noted) are courtesy of Radioactive Pictures.