Georgios Vizyenos was born in Eastern Thrace in 1849 and died in a mental asylum in Athens in 1896. He was a writer of influential, often autobiographical short stories – including “The Only Journey of His Life” – many of which are considered landmarks in Greek literature. From this starting point, filmmaker Lakis Papastathis has developed a stirring account of the life of an impressive, complex figure in recent Greek history.
The film begins as Vizyenos is admitted to an asylum in Athens at the end of the nineteenth century, in large part the result of his passionate but loving obsession for a twelve-year-old girl named Bettina. Reality and fiction are confused in his mind and Papastathis’s film cleverly interweaves various periods of Vizyenos’s life with his time in the asylum. He struggles to recall memories from his childhood in Constantinople and Thrace and reads through his earlier published literary work, which he had based on those memories.
The main focus of his reminiscences is his grandfather, who spent the first ten years of his life disguised as a girl. His family was obliged to hide their child’s gender to protect him from being forced to serve in the Turkish army; as in the years of Turkish rule, children of Christian families – up to the age of ten – were routinely abducted to be trained as fierce soldiers. Vizyenos’s psyche, we learn, has been powerfully influenced by his grandfather – the grim fate he avoided and the way he lived the rest of his life in fairy tales and dreams. This juxtaposition of hopes and fears, secrets and imagination, informs the whole of Papastathis’s respectful work.
Full of intense and elegant images, the film recounts stories of love and longing but also of desire and unfulfilled dreams. The Only Journey of His Life is an inventive and poetic work, one that recreates a tumultuous era in Greek history and the fragile beauty of a gifted mind on the brink of personal disaster.