PARIS – The first screening of Philip Koutsaftis’ new film ‘Zakros’ took place on Thursday evening, January 26 in0 the screening room of the Louvre Museum in Paris with many French and Greeks in the audience. The film was among those chosen this year to be screened by the Louvre Museum as part of the annual film week that it has been organizing for the last 16 years on the theme ‘Films for Art’. The movie was applauded by the audience and received rave reviews from French historian and archaeologist Alain Snape, who discussed it with its creator after the screening.

Zakros is a small bay in Eastern Crete where in 1961 the great Greek archaeologist Nikolaos Platon discovered a Minoan palace, the fourth on the island, after Knossos, Phaistos. and Malia.
As Koutsaftis explained to ANA/MPA news service, around 1450 BC, the inhabitants of Zakros were probably forced to abandon the palace due to a natural disaster, hoping that at some point they would return – but which probably did not happen. Thus the excavation brought to light a very large number of finds, mainly of household items.

Speaking about his film, Koutsafti stresses that “its points of reference are of course archaeology, history, memory, and culture, but it is a film neither about archaeology nor folklore. It is many things at once.”
He considers the link between yesterday and today to be self-evident, saying that we cannot ignore the fact that for thousands of years people have lived in the same places and walked the same streets.

The first shooting for his film took place in 1987, 26 years after Platon began his excavation and a year before he started working on another of his films, ‘Wild Stone’. Since then he has continued to go to Zakros periodically and the film was completed last year. The main sponsor of the film is Raykap and it is produced by Pan Entertainment.