Set to screen at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, ‘The Distance Between Us and the Sky’ comes from Greek-Australian filmmaker Vasilis Kekatos’ family experience.
Having won the Palme d’Or-Short Film at Cannes this year, Vasilis tells SBS Greek that his film was inspired by his late Greek-Australian uncle Spyros Kekatos’ life.
The short film follows two young men who meet one night at a gas station on the old Greek National Road and fall in love.
Spyros Kekatos, the brother of Vasilis' father, migrated to Australia in the 1970s at the age of 16 after coming out as gay to his family.
"Because of the hard conditions that existed for gay men in Greece back then, his parents sent him to Australia. Somehow, they threw him out of the house," Vasilis says.
He says that it is most likely Spyros’ father sent him to Australia "to live better in anonymity.”
"My uncle tried to integrate with the Melbourne Greeks, he worked as a teacher, but he missed very much his family and his friends back in Greece."
So, when Spyros turned 25, he returned to Greece, where he lived until his death.
Vasilis’s mother and his brother treated Spyros with incredible tenderness.
“We always ate with his partner at family tables, there was absolute acceptance, I grew up in an environment where being gay was never a topic.”
When Spyros’s long-term partner watched the film, he told Vasilis he met Spyros more or less the same way as the characters in the film.
“They, like the film’s protagonists, were coming from different social backgrounds,” Vasilis says.
Vasilis says that he was quite close to Spyros and that was what made him feel comfortable with homosexuality, always considering it normal.
"It is important for a family to accept a member of it as they are, with his or her partner without thinking if their partner is a man or a woman but as a person that is loved.”
Vasilis says that even today terrible stereotypes about homosexuality and marginalised groups persist in Greece.
"These people are still facing racism, they are victims of violent incidents and these incidents should be eliminated."
Vasilis’s father was born and lived in Melbourne until he reached adulthood and then he returned to Greece.
Originally from the Greek island of Kefallonia, the 28-year-old director became the second Greek winner of a Palm d’Or prize at Cannes in May. The first was won by legendary filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, awarded in 1998 for his feature film ‘Eternity and a Day’.
Vasilis’ film was also awarded the Queer Palm, an independently sponsored prize given to LGBT-relevant films entered into the Cannes Film Festival.
"It's certainly a big deal about what kind of cinema I'm going to do from now on," he tells SBS Greek.
"This is a historic victory for both Greece and the queer community."
Vasilis had studied law in London, but dropped it to study at the Fine Arts Art in the British capital.
In 2018, his short film ‘The Silence of the Dying Fish’ was the winner of the Villeurbanne Short Film Festival.
*Vasilis Kekatos’s award-winning short film ‘The Distance Between Us and The Sky’, starring Greek actors Nikolakis Zeginoglou and Ioko Ioannis Kotidis, will be screened at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival on Thursday 8 August and Tuesday 13 August.
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