Vangelis Sertaris died – according to

It is with great sadness that the Greek Directors Guild announces the loss of director and producer Vangelis Sertaris, an honorary member with an important, distinguished and creative career.

He was an international director with a rich body of work recognized in Greece and abroad. He won awards abroad and in Greece and was one of his most important films “Robbery in Athens” (1969) is a brilliant film noir and political romantic drama “Vassiliki” (1997)

His other films include “Greenhouse” (1985), “The Seventh Son of Love” (2001). He was also a co-producer on Kostas Ferris’s “Rebetiko”.

Who is Vangelis Sertaris?

Vangelis Sertaris was born in 1935 in Vlachokerasia. Empirically, as he said, the civil war that was born in the occupation and lasted until 1949 after the Germans left in October 1944, the occupation is immortalized.

A terrible post-civil period ensued, which lasted for years and left many open wounds. After primary school, Sertaris attended Tripoli’s 2nd High School for three years, and another three years at Tegea High School (Alias). There, he tells us: “I was lucky to learn Greek well, I believe, and I owe it to the teacher Dimitris Papanikolaou, who taught us ancient and modern Greek.” He continued to study at Panteio School for two years. The most important reason was his interest in cinema.

A school called the Film School was created in Athens, and it started functioning the first year.

He promised a lot and hired some famous professors like Vagalos, for scenery and decor, Ms. Tzouga, for acting, Christos Vahliotis from the famous Strasberg School in America, Christos Theodoropoulos from Paris. IDHEC, a school known to teach direction, script analysis and film aesthetics. And Robiros Mantoulis studied cinema in America at Yale University. Here he teaches direction and film technique. In this school, his fellow students were Kostas Vretagos, Giovanna Peso, Kostas Ferris, Theodoros Adamopoulos and others.

Vangelis Sertaris has said that Christos Theodoropoulos was distinguished for his erudition, above all for his aesthetic cultivation and his method of analyzing and writing the script. He learned a lot from Theodoropoulos and from Christos Vahliotis, from whom he learned about the ways in which the director takes the actors to where the character needs to be and how you capture their soul.

He worked as an assistant director on several productions till 1967 and was involved in all the processes of setting up the production and choosing actors, selecting sets and locations, directing and finally editing. This is the period when one mainly learns from the mistakes of others, he admits to us. In 1967 he wrote a screenplay titled “When the City Sleeps”. With this title he also found a financier, his friend the actor Kostas Pitsios. The film was shot on the streets of Omonia in 1968.

At the request of the distribution office, the title was changed or not played in theaters. The film was a success. Since then, Serdaris has worked as a director and independent producer in cinema and, after 1975, in television. He has directed and produced films that have won international festivals and the Thessaloniki festival. He has produced and directed a significant number of historical, ethnographic, scientific and ethnographic documentaries, mainly for Greek television.

Documentaries ATHOS THE MOUNTAIN OF SILENCE and PATMOS THE ISLAND OF THE REVELATION for English Channel 4. On behalf of Hellenic Television, in a series of documentaries, he documented the Greco-Italian and Greco-German wars of 1940-1945 with documents and personal testimonies from survivors, ordinary soldiers and Greek, Italian, German and British. officers and ordinary citizens.

In these documentaries he collaborated with history professors Vassilis Sphairora, Hagen Fleisser, Apostolos Vakalopoulos, Pascalis Kitromelidis, academic and writer Angelos Vilachos, poets Nikiforos Vretakos and Odysseus Elitis.