Vancouver Greek Film Festival review: 01 offers insider's view of a brilliant century in arts
At The Cinematheque, Nanos Valaoritis’s memories of a long life in poetry are like a museum you never want to leave
Nanos Valaoritis in Dimitris Mouzakitis’s 01.
The Cinematheque presents 01 as part of the Vancouver Greek Film Festival on March 26 and 31. The festival runs March 13 to April 2
THERE’S SOMETHING SO gloriously claustrophobic about 01, in which we spend 100 minutes in the company of Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis.
Released in 2024, it’s the most recent of the seven features screening at The Cinematheque’s fourth annual Vancouver Greek Film Festival—other titles include 1957’s perennial Boy on a Dolphin starring Sophia Loren, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, and the Theo Angelopolous masterpiece The Travelling Players—but 01 gives us a sprawling, insider’s view of 20th-century arts and letters, almost entirely from inside a cramped and dusty Athens apartment.
Valaoritis spent his life moving between London, Paris, and San Francisco, strolling into historic scenes as he avoided Nazi occupation and Greece’s own military junta. He collected friends like Andre Breton, Picasso, William Burroughs, the Beats, the Yippies, producing his own poetry and publishing underground journals and literary reviews that the 98-year-old, seen here in the last year of his life, frequently describes as “punk”.
As such, we hear personal recollections and ever-so-slightly gossipy remarks on the likes of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, who was “a bit of a sadist”. We hear Gregory Corso described as “the worst, a brat, envious and competitive…but a good poet”. He most admires Burroughs and the French artist Francis Picabia, who marginalized themselves but also prevailed out of stubborn independence.
We also see Valaoritis attending an exhibition of his own art in an Athens gallery, a stooped but elfin old man possibly unrecognized by the patrons around him. Later, he’ll recall that Marcel Duchamp scoffed at his work, braying that it was “faux naïf”. His early nude line drawings are in fact very charming, but Valaoritis takes it on the chin, shrugging that he’s just a writer who also paints.
More broadly, he’s a man at the end of a lifelong creative bender, seemingly pulled by mystical force into extraordinary and successive artistic communities. In a film that never loses its hold on the viewer—Valaoritis’s memory is like a museum you never want to leave, same goes for the apartment—it’s the film’s attention to his wife and soul-partner, the great American surrealist Marie Wilson, that perhaps stands out the most, partly because her work is so breathtaking, maybe even supernaturally driven. (He thinks so.)
But it’s also because this little-known and constitutionally modest genius (“her ego was non-existent”) was every bit the equal of their star-studded friends. The great Greek poet Valaoritis is still madly in awe of this woman. 
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