The Airport is a three-screen film installation conceived as a meditation on the history of Greece and its recent financial crisis. Set in the landscape of Southern Greece and an abandoned airfield near Athens, the film recalls the work of two filmmaking greats: Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) and Theo Angelopoulos (1935–2012). Accompanied by a soundtrack composed by John Akomfrah, the film’s elliptical narrative weaves together cinematic, literary, philosophical, and artistic traditions, where spaces of human ruin and natural beauty abound. Populated by displaced and anachronistic characters – including an elderly man in a tuxedo who re-lives moments from his past and his future, a wandering astronaut, a marauding gorilla, and forlorn travelers – the film contemplates the significance of empires and the ghosts which linger in our collective consciousness, both physically through archi- tecture and the psychological traces from previous generations. The film’s elastic sense of time references Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while Angelopoulos’s technique of constant movement between camera, characters, and locations is also employed to a poetic effect.
