The screen stands on the beach, a white rectangle of stretched canvas against a sky that is still pink at nine in the evening. Behind it, the Aegean laps quietly at the sand. In front of it, around one hundred and forty people sit on low wooden chairs, beanbags and cushions, drinking cold beer and eating pistachios from paper cones. When the projector clicks on, a cheer goes up. Cinema Thalassa, on the small Cycladic island of Arkeos, is open for another night, and every seat has been sold.
Thalassa was founded fourteen years ago by Nikos Lemonidis, a former projectionist from Athens who retired to the island and discovered, to his horror, that there was nothing to watch in the evenings. He borrowed a projector from an old colleague, hung a bedsheet between two poles and showed a black-and-white comedy to eleven neighbours. The next week, forty people came. Today the cinema runs every night from mid-June to mid-September and is one of the most beloved institutions in the islands.
A programme with a sense of humour
The programme is chosen by his daughter, Eleni, who took over five years ago when her father's knees began to object to the ladders. She mixes restored classics with recent art-house films, the occasional blockbuster and, every Sunday, a Greek comedy from the 1960s that the older islanders can recite line by line. Films are shown in their original language with Greek and English subtitles. Tickets cost about the same as a coffee in Athens.
The setting has its own dramaturgy. Ferries pass behind the screen, their lights sliding across the picture. Cats wander between the chairs. Once, during a tense thriller, a fishing boat moored just offshore sounded its horn at the exact moment of a gunshot, and the audience applauded for a full minute. On windy nights the canvas billows and the actors seem to breathe. Nobody has ever asked for a refund.
In a normal cinema, the film is the only thing happening. Here the whole night is happening, and the film is just the best part of it. — Eleni Lemonidi
The cinema has become something of a pilgrimage for film lovers, and a few directors have begun to request screenings. Last summer, the Portuguese-French filmmaker Joaquim Aveline showed his debut feature to a crowd of fishermen, tourists and schoolchildren, and later said it was the best reception the film had anywhere, including at the festivals that made its name. Eleni treats such visitors with polite indifference. The islanders, she says, come first.
When the film ends, shortly after eleven, the lights stay off for a moment so the audience can see the stars. Then people fold their chairs, gather their children and wander back along the single road towards the harbour, arguing happily about what they have just seen. The screen is left standing on the beach, pale in the moonlight, waiting for tomorrow.
