A Birthday Celebration: part 1 Lawrence Durrell's Greece

In 1976 Peter Adam took Lawrence Durrell (who celebrates his 70th birthday this year), author of several Greek Island books, back to Greece. Their journey took them to Corfu, Rhodes, Crete and Hydra. Durrell has often said that words alone cannot express the true nature of Greek landscape and village life. In this film he pushes aside the debris of the present and guides us through the Greece of his youth.
"The Greece that I knew as a young and aggressive poet has changed. Nevertheless I feel there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps re-create a little bit of the Greece which is not finished yet and gone for good, and whose ghost still rises up to afflict me from time to time. I would like to recall those golden years and to throw open the many-coloured background of Greece's own history so that the landscape may be evoked before the eyes of the viewer who is not free to touch with his own hands or to feel the beauty of Greece."

"The look of the thing was spectacular, and Durrell on tour proved to be drily funny and unpompous." (The Guardian)
Film cameraman JACQUES boumendil Producer peter ADAM