In the second hour of the program “Take Your Time”, we had the chance to listen to an interview by Lefteris Charonitis, a highly experienced director with an extensive body of work in documentary filmmaking. The interview followed the tribute evening dedicated to him by the Chania Film Festival last Saturday, during which the festival’s director, Matthaios Frantzesakis, presented the filmmaker with his newly published book titled “All I Managed to Do”.
Lefteris Charonitis spoke about what he has managed to do, what he would have liked to do, and what he believes should happen in the near future. He took us back in time to the Athens of another era, when all the great artists of music, theatre, cinema, literature, and the arts lived and gathered in the city’s well-known haunts. He talked about his work in documentary film and the research that led to cinematic portraits of great Greeks, as well as about his village, Sisarcha in Heraklion, where he has returned in recent years and which now serves as his base for future projects, because, as he characteristically says, borrowing a Chinese proverb, “in life, one must die standing, with one’s shoes on.”