In one of the many eye-opening moments in “Super Paradise,” Greek filmmaker Steve Krikris’ loving documentary portrait of the island of Mykonos, Marilli Tsopanelli, a writer and multi-disciplinary teacher of mime and dance, recalls the bohemian, free-loving spirit that prevailed on the island in the 1960s and ’70s. “Most of my friends lost their virginity in 1971,” Tsopanelli explains. Another interview subject puts it more bluntly: “So much sex.”
It would be inaccurate to characterize Krikris’ documentary as a lusty romp through the hedonistic heyday of “a scandalous place,” as another of the film’s talking heads describes it; indeed, the director, who spent summers on Mykonos throughout his youth, thoughtfully traces the island’s journey from an impoverished fishing community during the Second World War through its golden age as a hippie enclave in the ’70s, continuing onward to the velvet-roped excesses of today.
“Super Paradise,” which premieres this week in the Newcomers competition of the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival, is the first documentary from Krikris, whose deadpan drama, “The Waiter,” premiered at Thessaloniki’s sister event in 2018. Based on an original idea by Paul Typaldos, who shares producing credits with Dafni Kalafati, it’s an emotional return to one of the defining places of the filmmaker’s adolescence, the site of endless summers that also marked an “important milestone” by setting him on a course to make movies.
It was in Mykonos that Krikris, who was born in the U.S. but moved to Greece around the age of 5, befriended a San Francisco gallerist who invited him to the Bay Area; there he was introduced to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he would go on to study film. “Everything started from Mykonos,” Krikris explains.
“Super Paradise” — which takes its name from one of the island’s iconic beaches — charts nearly a century in the island’s development, but it lingers longingly on the golden years when Krikris and his Athens pals would pitch up with just a thousand drachmas — the equivalent of a few bucks today — and spend several weeks camped out under the stars, unfurling their sleeping bags on empty beaches or on the terraces of welcoming locals.
“It was the era, it was the music, it was the people, it was the place,” Krikris says. “Everybody was the same. There were no bouncers, there were no limousines. Everybody was mingling. You would see the Mykonian fishermen, you see the hippies and the VIPs and all these fashion designers sitting at the same table. Everybody was together.”
“Super Paradise” recalls a golden age on the Greek island of Mykonos.
Courtesy of Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
That care-free spirit, as the film illustrates, hardly existed in a vacuum, emerging in part as a defiant response to darkening times. In the ’70s, as Mykonos was being discovered by the free-loving hippies who landed it on the map, Greeks elsewhere were living under the iron fist of a military dictatorship. Homosexuality, though freely expressed — and celebrated — on the island, was illegal. Elsewhere the U.S. was fighting a bloody and unpopular war in Vietnam, while military regimes were seizing power across Latin America. It was against that backdrop that Mykonos “emerged as a beacon of hope, freedom and self-expression,” as one of the film’s subjects notes.
By the time Krikris aged into young adulthood, that bohemian ethos had begun to fade. Moneyed interests came pouring in to cater to globe-trotting, jet-setting elites, while Mykonos was increasingly “starting to become a brand name.” “It wasn’t for me anymore,” says the director, who avoided the island for years for fear that he would “ruin it by going back.”
In the end, Krikris and his team returned to Mykonos more than a half-dozen times across four years to make “Super Paradise.” He accumulated roughly 100 hours of material, including interviews with many of the men and women who were part of the swinging scene of the ’70s, as well as Super 8 reenactments and archival material Krikris sourced with the help of Canadian archival producer Judy Ruzylo. Alongside editor Marios Kleftakis, he spent nearly 2 1/2 years bringing “Super Paradise” to the screen.
The resulting film not only charts the remarkable transformation of Mykonos but suggests it’s hardly an outlier, a victim of the same forces of global tourism that have reshaped destinations like Bali, Ibiza and Cancun. Citing Nietzsche, the Greek writer and philosopher Yiorgos Veltsos says “tourism is a leper,” and to back that up, there are no shortage of talking heads in “Super Paradise” to testify that today’s Mykonos is “a supermarket,” “the Wall Street of Greece,” and “a degrading replica of the past.”
Krikris, however, is among those who still describe it as “a special place.” Or, as another local sage puts it: “It used to be a fishing island. Now, the boats are bigger. But life goes on.”
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival runs March 6 – 16.
