''Like Stone Lions at the Gateway into Night'' (french: Comme des lions de pierre à l'entrée de la nuit) is a 2012

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

Olivier Zuchuat Olivier Zuchuat is a Swiss film director. Born in 1969 in Geneva. After studying theoretical physics at EPFL and Trinity College and literature he became a teaching assistant at the University of Lausanne ( Switzerland). He directed several ...

Summary

Between 1947 and 1950, more than 80,000 Greek citizens were imprisoned on the isle of

Makronisos Makronisos ( el, Μακρόνησος, lit. ''Long Island''), or Makronisi, is an island in the Aegean sea, in Greece, notorious as the site of a political prison from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is located close to the coast of Attica, facing the ...

in reeducation camps created to "fight the spread of

communism Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

". Among these exiles were a number of writers and poets, including Yannis Ritsos and Tassos Livaditis. Despite the deprivation and torture, these prisoners succeeded in composing poems that describe their struggle for survival in this world of internment. These texts, some of them buried in the camps, were later found. ''Like Stone Lions at the Gateway into Night'' blends these poetic writings with the reeducation propaganda constantly piped through the camps' loudspeakers. Long tracking shots take the view on a trance-like journey through the camp ruins, interrupted along the way by segments from photographic archives. It is a cinematic essay that revives the memory of forgotten ruins and a battle lost.

Festivals

* Visions du réel - NYON 2012 (International Competition) * DOK Leipzig 2012 (International Competition)

External links

Official website
* Swiss documentary films Documentary films about Greece Anti-communism in Greece Works about the Greek Civil War Makronisos {{Switzerland-film-stub