Paradise Lost

September 1922, Smyrna is the last city that burns to ashes sending over 2 million refugees of Greek descent that survived from the coast of Turkey, across the Aegean Sea to Greece. Nikolaos Tsuruktsoglu, an important political figure of Smyrna, as well as a newspaper publisher of the French La Reforme, is imprisoned the night before the Great Fire breaks out. He is held in a room in the city’s guardhouse by the Turkish Army. In the last minutes of his life, shortly before he dies, the captive Tsuruktsoglu envisions images of the past, present and future of his life, and of the city that is being lost forever. Fragments of memories, real events, and hallucinations spring up inside his cell, while he is confronted with the separation from his wife Ifigeneia and their two children. The viewer experiences the last 15 minutes of Tsuruktsoglu’s farewell to life, until he dies.