16 – 26 September 2020
AND I WISH YOU A HAPPY LIFE
Alexandros Pissourios
I, TONY
Argyro Nicolaou and Margaux Fitoussi
13 PHOTOS
Tony Moussoulides
The Island Club, in its third annual collaboration with the Lemesos International Documentary Festival, presents the documentary shorts And I wish you a happy life by Alexandros Pissourios and I, Tony by Argyro Nicolaou and Margaux Fitoussi, along with the exhibition 13 Photos by Tony Moussoulides.
And I wish you a happy life, Directed by Alexandros Pissourios, 2020, 44 minutes
And I wish you a happy life is a contemplative documentary about the unexpected separation of the filmmaker’s parents at an advanced age, shot on Super 16 mm film during Pissourios’ visits to Cyprus over the course of a year. The film is orchestrated through a grammar of daily labour in the serene landscape of rural Nikitari and organised around the father’s re-reading of his break-up letter, through which his relationship with the past and present is revealed, and unsettling confessions about love and fulfilment are made. Filmed with tenderness, And I wish you a happy life gradually takes the form of an informal conversation between filmmaker and subject in an attempt to metabolise multiple layers of rupture.
I, Tony, Directed by Argyro Nicolaou and Margaux Fitoussi, 2019, 19 minutes
Photographer Tony Moussoulides is determined to make a film about his career in Swinging Sixties London. Now 85 and home in Cyprus, he re-enacts – and directs – scenes from his life, featuring, among others, Andy Warhol and John Huston. Tensions mount as Tony’s ambitions clash with the vision of the film’s directors, and a seemingly conventional biopic becomes an inquiry into the human desire not to be forgotten. Ambiguously positioned between fact and fiction, I, Tony is a film about legacy, artistic authority, and the contentious processes of memoralisation that documentary cinema often engages in.
13 Photos by Tony Moussoulides
Tony Moussoulides is a Cypriot fashion photographer who made a career in London in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ’80s, shooting for Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and other magazines. In 1972, Moussoulides was commissioned to shoot Andy Warhol’s portrait at the artist’s legendary Factory in New York. 13 Photos by Tony Moussoulides features archival photographs, printed matter and newly produced prints selected by filmmaker Argyro Nicolaou. The exhibition also comprises Moussoulides’ rarely-seen documentary Spliffs, Joints and Pot (1965), which was recently digitised and preserved by the British Film Institute.
Alexandros Pissourios (b. 1982, Nicosia, Cyprus) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. He works with photography as well as analogue and digital video. His filmmaking is motivated by observational attentiveness and carries an affinity to experimental traditions. Selected screenings and exhibitions include: “Terra Mediterranea: In Action”, Leipzig, Germany (2017); 27th International Ankara Film Festival, Turkey (2016); LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Image, ICA, London (2012); “On site”, Barbican Exhibition Halls, London (2011); 25th London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, British Film Institute, London (2011).
Argyro Nicolaou (b. 1989, Nicosia, Cyprus) is a scholar and filmmaker based in New York City. Her academic research focuses on the representation of Mediterranean displacements in literature, film, and visual art, while her filmmaking interrogates the conditions of politics and art-making in ‘small’ and ‘unimportant’ places. Her work has been screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Harvard Sackler Gallery, Cambridge MA; Asolo Art Film Festival, Italy; and Paphos European Capital of Culture, among others. Her writing has been featured in the American Historical Review, Boston Art Review, and MoMA post. Nicolaou holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.
Margaux Fitoussi (b. 1989, Paris, France) is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and translator based in Paris and New York City. Her research explores the cultural politics of “betrayal” and traces the history of unrest and discontent among the Tunisian Left since independence from France in 1956. Her award-winning short film EL HARA (2017) was released online as the Jewish Film Institute’s Short of the Month. Her work has been exhibited at festivals, universities, and galleries including the Film Society at Lincoln Center (New York), the MountainFilm Telluride Film Festival (Colorado, USA), the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Juadïsme in Paris, and the Museo Cultural Pinakotheque in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Tony Moussoulides (b. 1934, Nicosia, Cyprus) is a Cypriot fashion photographer who lived and worked in London from the 1960s onwards. Following his graduation from the Pancyprian High School in Nicosia, he became an impresario for the newly-established Republic of Cyprus, bringing cultural acts from Egypt and Lebanon. In the 1950s, Moussoulides moved to London, where he took courses in photography and film and apprenticed for fashion photographer John French. After opening his own studio as a fashion and beauty photographer in London, Moussoulides worked for Vogue, Marie Claire, Elle, and other magazines. At the height of his career, he had studios in London, Hamburg and New York. Since retiring in the early 2000s, Moussoulides has been living in Nicosia.