GAGGARIN – THE WORLD FROM LOW

Spithimian Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, the first cosmonaut in the history of mankind, comes to Athens in February 1962 to assure the Greeks that Nikita Khrushchev, despite his statements to the contrary, does not intend to bomb the Acropolis. He cannot imagine that his visit will cause a series of chain reactions, more paranoid than the usual Cold War psychoses, nor does he suspect that, four decades later and while he himself will have already met a tragic death, a notorious cinema, in one of the most degraded areas of the capital, will be rechristened with his name, will house unconventional artists, both from the cult and the trash scene and will act as a timeless detonator of memory.
With Gagarin 205, the shop of Nikolas Triantafyllidis as its attraction, Petros Tatsopoulos signs an exciting nonfiction novel and undertakes to tell us the history of post-war Greece, as we will never be taught in schools. From Manos Hadjidaki's now legendary speech about Rebetiko at the Technis Theater to his blasphemous show about Floriniotis in the Third Program, from the mudflats of Kalamaria to the Greek neighborhoods in Montreal, Chicago and Astoria, emblematic forms of popular satire and of teenage dreamers – such as Harry Clynn and Kostas Gouzgounis – take us on a tour of a world where the boundaries between the sublime and the vulgar have been dissolved, while the boldest fantasy flirts with a long-lost innocence. A nostalgic look at the time when culture wasn't put in cans and you could even see Pasolini's Theorem in a thrift store.