Original subtitles

The policeman will separate the mother from the child.

She was born here.

Ιn this house.

The house of my grandmother’s.

My grandfather died

when a crane crashed upon him at the factory.

My mom had barely met him.

My grandmother, who worked in the same factory

she witnessed his death with her own eyes.

And when she sued the company,

she lost both the trial and her job.

As a girl, my mom,

she studied

and studied.

She did nothing else but study.

She was accepted to study Letters at the University of Athens.

A few years later,

when she went to Florence as a MA scholarship student,

she met my father

in a hall of the Uffizi Museum,

in front of the strangest of the Botticelli’s.

All by chance,

she gave birth to me in a field full of partridges

near Allegre,

all by herself.

and she carried me back to the house on foot,

a newborn,

with the blood

running down her thighs.

"The desert."

That’s what she called the world.

She slept

too much,

for hours on end.

My father stopped caring about her in any way.

He felt as if he had

a sleeping animal in the house.

And all those letters

sent to her by my grandmother,

ever more pleading,

heartbreaking

and angry,

she never read them.

But I did.

I read them with my mom’s old pocket Greek-Italian dictionary.

On my eighteenth birthday,

my mother came to my room.

She entered under the sheets,

by my side,

with a sparkle

in her eyes.

She gave me a warm hug

and then she said to me,

"My name is Simeon the Μadman."

"From this day, I’ll speak my true language."

"I’ll walk back to the city I remember"

"and with the power of God"

"I will mock the world."

Do you need help?

Come here, you must be cold.

Your clothes are wet, look at you.

Here, will you put this on?

Μy Mother is A Saint

A short film by Syllas Tzoumerkas

with Angeliki Papoulia and Jacopo Olmo Antinori