An Evening with Tassos Boulmetis and “1968”

Saturday, October 28, 2023
7:30 p.m.
Billy Wilder Theater, UCLA Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024 United States + Google Map

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Gefyra

7:30pm – Film Screening

Q&A with:

Tassos Boulmetis (Director)
Paul Malcolm (Senior Public Programmer, UCLA Film & Television Archive)
John K. Papadopoulos (Distinguished Professor of Archaeology & Classics, UCLA, and Director, Athenian Agora Excavations)

Admission is free. No advance reservations needed. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event. Please visit the link below for more information.

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2023/10/28/evening-with-tassos-boulmetis

ABOUT THE FILM
April 4, 1968. Athens’ Kallimarmaro Stadium is abuzz, with thousands of people gathered and millions listening through their radios. The AEK – Slavia Prague basketball game has just begun. A girl in love is dreaming of her wedding day, while her future husband becomes more desperate with every Greek shot through the opposing team’s hoop. An elderly husband and wife remember the home they left behind. A young communist prisoner cheers from his jail cell and a PROPO betting shop becomes the place where old and new wounds resurface. Years before this night, three Constantinopolitans decided to create an athletic union that will commemorate their story. At the end of this night, a moment in Greek history had been made.

DIRECTOR BIO
Tassos Boulmetis, the director of A Touch of Spice and Mythopathy, built his film, “1968,” around a true athletic triumph that made history and united a divided country. Mr. Boulmetis studied Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Film Production and Direction at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a scholarship from the A. S. Onassis Foundation. In Greece he started his career as a director/producer of TV shows for the state TV networks. In 1990 he wrote, directed and co-produced the film The Dream Factory, which won awards in both Greece and the U.S. A Touch of Spice, a film that he wrote, directed and co-produced became the most successful film ever in Greece with over 1,600,00 theater viewers. It has been distributed in 45 countries. His third feature, Mythopathy, a coming-of-age story of a young man during the 70’s in Greece, is a sarcastic comedy about the Greek political system and its path to the recent economic crisis. Boulmetis is currently artist-in-residence for Gefyra. In fall 2023, he is teaching at UCLA and engaging in public programming at Simon Fraser University.

This program is made possible thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

For parking and theater details, please visit https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/billy-wilder-theater

ABOUT GEFYRA
This event is part of a series of events held in collaboration with the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for this pilot program, which seeks to create networks across the West Coast of North America and between the West Coast and Greece. For more information about this collaboration, please visit https://hellenic.ucla.edu/Gefyra/.

For inquiries, please contact hellenic@humnet.ucla.edu