Light Falls Vertical

One day a man who signed as Ernesto contacted me and said he wanted to make a film about his life. His message was that there are always two parties to the problem of domestic violence - the victim and the perpetrator. He was the perpetrator. I was intuitively drawn to the idea, and Ernesto and I agreed that I would make a film about his story.to make a film about his story, drawing inspiration from the autobiographical novel he had written. This agreement was only the pretext that allowed us to get closer to each other and gradually reveal the deeper motivations that attracted us to each other's stories. While working on this film, I found myself in a very delicate situation as Ernesto's intermediary, the man

While working on this film, I found myself in a very delicate situation as Ernesto's intermediary, the man who was dealing with the violence he had perpetrated against his family, the violence he said he inherited from his father from his father. At the same time, I was confronted with my own struggle, coping with the past from which I had fled two decades ago. Like Ernesto, I am also an islander. As a woman born and raised on the Greek island of Crete, my is my story is quite different from Ernesto's, but what we seemed to share were the memories of our fathers fathers and the patterns of violence that prevailed in our families. Suddenly Ernesto, who was once a stranger, became a familiar figure.

Alternating between the role of the victim and the perpetrator, he reenacts scenes from his childhood, his mother and himself and himself suffering at the hands of his father. Then, in other scenes directed by himself, he is already an adult who commits violent acts against his wife. Far from just condemning Ernesto, I have tried to draw parallels between our stories, to build a bridge of intimacy and understanding. This bridge is built slowly and carefully in the film, and it remains fragile, exposing our shared vulnerabilities. Through the narrative of the other, the most distant, I searched for answers in my own narrative, switching back and forth between the mirror and the magnifying glass. I allowed myself to lean on his memories of violence to navigate the stormy waters of my own memories. As the project progressed, my story grew louder and intertwined with Ernesto's until I realized that we were interdependent in the process of healing.

,,Light Falls Vertical" is a film about Ernesto and his struggle with his patterns of violence and abuse. It is also a film about his partner Juliane and her reality of the intense presence and absence of the man in her life absence of the man in her life. And finally and above all, it is a film about me and my encounter with the torment of my past,my late father, the silence that permeated our dialogue, and the circles of violence.

– Efthymia Zymvragaki, October 2022