Skip to main content

About


Lukas Agelastos is a Greek-German indie filmmaker with a focus on no-to-low budget ("micro-budget") productions. Born in Athens in 1977, he studied Social Studies and Business Administration at Scottish Universities. He began his creative career in photography and video production and then studied Film Directing through the Raindance Masters programme at Staffordshire University in England. He is now a film industry mentor for the Raindance programme.
Lukas often works with his wife, director Spiridoula Gouskou. Their first short documentary "The Unemployed Man Who Feeds the Homeless" (2013) about an Athens soup kitchen went viral on Facebook and YouTube. Their feature documentary about the founder of the soup kitchen "My Human Self" (2017), was awarded Best Documentary at the Festival “Bridges” in Corinth and won the Jury Prize at the Antakya Festival in Turkey. Lukas’s short film “The Line” (2019), travelled to such festivals as Drama, Thessaloniki, Raindance, Foyle (Derry), and received very positive reviews. It is a proof-of-concept for “The Astronaut’s Room”, a social realism project supported by the Greek Film Center. 
Lukas and Spiridoula's latest feature documentary "Nowhere to Go" (2022) follows three of the thousands of homeless people in Athens, investigating the state's failure to reintegrate them into society. It premiered in March 2022 in the Official Selection of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival to rave reviews from the Greek press, such as "A blow in the stomach", "It cuts you in half".
As a documentary teacher, Lukas oversaw production for one of his student’s shorts, Barter With Time (2019; dir. Stella Kovoglanidi, premiered at Docfest 2020). 
As a producer, he is currently in pre-production for a short film called "Patinage" which Spiridoula is directing and which she co-wrote with award-winning playwright Georgia Pierroutsakou. The short was greenlit by Greek National TV's (ERT) Microfilm programme and is set to be filmed in 2022.
One of his dreams is to make a film based on his time with the Scottish band “Underwood” in the early 2000s.
With the wish that he won't be the only one reading this blog as a personal chronicle of his filmmaking journey, he hopes that it may help film students, aspiring filmmakers, and cinema enthusiasts who are interested in the academic and practical side of no-to-lo budget filmmaking, especially in the sub-genre of Social Realism.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The structure of a Social Realism screenplay

Structuring a Social Realism screenplay  by Lukas Agelastos In this article, I am looking at a concentration of the ideas and thoughts I drew from experts and professionals on screenplay structure. I am attempting to offset the lack of texts on Social Realism screenplay structure by discussing some concepts that seem to be relevant to the sub-genre. I will discuss how structure applies to "art cinema" and Social Realism. “Structure is the prime element of a film or television script. But while the importance of structure is clear, the interpretation is often less so” (Miller 1984). According to McKee (2014), the purpose of structure is to yield progressively building pressures that compel characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking actions and choices, slowly revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self. "It is because narrative structures bend time to human will that we delight in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some Key Concepts of Film Language

Some Key Concepts of Film Language  by Lukas Agelastos Casablanca (1942) Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand. The semiotics of film is easy to explain because it is difficult to understand (Monaco 2009). How does film manage to communicate meaning? While we can instinctively recognise meanings that are conveyed through film, the study of semiotics can help us analyse them further. In his book "How To Read A Film" (2009), James Monaco refers to certain key concepts that are important to the study of the language of film. I have tried to condense these concepts and find some illuminating examples for them in order to understand them better myself. Signs The Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure defined a sign as being composed of: the signifier - the form which the sign takes; and the signified - the concept it represents. Example: the word 'Open' (when it is meaningful to someone who encounters it ...
2 comments
Read more

Ken Loach and Social Realism films

Ken Loach and Social Realism films  by Lukas Agelastos      My conviction is that every person should be born into equal opportunities. Social Realism films exhibit a socially conscious perspective while at the same time remaining accessible to mainstream audiences.   I first watched Ken Loach films because of my love for Scotland. I am very fond of what I perceive to be the positive traits of their mentality: the humbleness, the humour, the hospitality, the genuine friendliness and the way people are not brought up to be the centre of the universe.      I was astonished by how realistically life in Glasgow and surrounding areas was depicted in Ae Fond Kiss (2004), My Name is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002) and more recently, The Angels’ Share (2012). The images of poverty, the realness of the humour, the language, and the way the films are shot are “real”.
1 comment
Read more