This is how Costas’ fairy tale begins. Costas is a driver at the metro railway that connects the North with the South, the mountains with the sea. He lives alone, without a relationship or a social circle. He believes that the train he drives every day has been constructed above the imaginary flow of the ancient rivers. Anna works at the ticket counter of a ferry company in the port of Piraeus. She lives alone, also without a relationship or social circle. She takes the train every day to go to work and back. Costas and Anna are slowly dying from lack of love in a city that’s slowly dying from lack of love, Athens, 2012. Costas falls in love with Anna, whom he observes as a passenger on the train every day. He loves her from a distance, but not dare approach her. He tries to record his fairy tale in a tape recorder and give it to her as a gift. He does nothing until the day that a routine medical check-up turns his life upside down. The timid and reclusive Costas is soon transformed into a man who pursues his right to life and love. Anna, after much hesitation and uncertainty, gives in to his persistence and allows him to approach her. These two people will finally say the words “I love you” to each other,

journeying towards the sea in the train that crosses the city and these words will wake up the fairy tale of the rivers small gods of Athens, at the dawn of a bright new day.

ForEver unfolds and takes place entirely in the devastated Athens of the economic and political crisis of 2012. A city whose inhabitants neither look, see, nor love any more. In this dark setting I have very consciously chosen utopia and the dream… Costas and Anna will try desperately to love each other. And they will succeed because when people begin to love each other once again, the hope of a new world will be resurrected. The film will have a very particular visual form: a monochromatic, almost black-and-white look that will gradually turn into color at the end, when the beginning of hope has been achieved. Similarly, the film will not have a musical score but just a complex soundscape consisting of the objective and subjective sounds of the city. This poetic approach will be served also by the filming of the actors on locations, using a perspective with which the characters will appear as if “embodied” in the urban landscape where they move. The internal rhythms of the shots will be languid and time will flow in the subjective way that the heroes sense it. Their faces, their gazes, their silences will register in those time spans that allow the audience to “converse” internally with them. The question of the dual man-city relationship is something that I also dealt with in my first feature, Gold Dust. ForEver is a continuation of it. Different style, different stories but similar regarding the essence of a search for Time and Memory with the aim of gaining a life more humane. And, most of all, similar regarding the need to love. To be able to love again.