With his first feature film, the then young Nikos Nikolaidis corroborated his mature sense of cinematic expression, as well as a view of the world, which (with hindsight) seems to herald his later mastery and perspectives. His starting point was (for the first and last time in his career) a work not written by him, but the emblematic poem by Lambros Porfyras: ‘Wretched woman, our little house’s been haunted by your melancholy beauty…’.

From a fishing boat scrapyard, the film takes us into a mansion on the island of Hydra, which seems to have been abandoned in the wake of a death. The camera slowly explores old objects, the ‘protagonist’ among them being a mannequin with a slightly bent neck. Enclosure, followed by movement (breaking free?); arrested climax; the mannequin shatters, the clock stops, the candle is extinguished. Life (or a memory of life?) and death; the process of mourning. Everything is constantly emphasised by sights and sounds, with a soundtrack of classical pieces. Romantic spirit and a poetic study, or a covert ‘video clip on Schubert’s Unfinished symphony’, as Nikolaidis himself put it?