SUNKEN

VITHISI

By Dimitris GKOTSIS

MARNI FILMS - as PROD

First film - Development 2025

Abandoned ships and their toxic cargo are sunk into oblivion just 20km away from Athens, at the city of Elefsina. Sunken "dives" into the wounds of a city that remains hidden on the threshold of the European Capital of Culture 2023. Are we all affected equally in this environmental crisis?

Festivals
& Awards

Thessaloniki IFF 2022
Agora ERT Pitching Award
Sofia Documental 2022
best Pitching award
Evia Film Project 2022
Consultation Pitching Award
    • Year of production
    • 2025
    • Genres
    • First film, Environmental, Documentary
    • Countries
    • GREECE
    • Languages
    • GREEK
    • Budget
    • 0 - 0.3 M$
    • Duration
    • 80 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Dimitris GKOTSIS
    • Writer(s)
    • George ZAFEIROPOULOS
    • Producer(s)
    • Mina DREKI (MARNI FILMS), Anamaria ANTOCCI (TANGAJ PRODUCTION), Sylvana SANTAMARIA (SOILFILMS MEDIA GMBH)
    • Synopsis
    • shipwreck | ˈʃɪprɛk | noun
      1: a wrecked ship or its parts
      2: the destruction or loss of a ship
      3: an irretrievable loss or failure

      A team of divers arrives at the Eleusinian Gulf in order to search and locate a lost and shipwrecked concrete cargo vessel dated from WWII. After initially failing to locate the concrete cargo vessel, their interest shifts, as the underwater shots reveal a hidden cemetery of shipwrecks under the water surface. Around 32 ship carcasses with toxic cargo, laying on the sea floor, forgotten. Ships full of destinations, journeys, stories and death. A death brimful of rust and the abandoned petrol waste silently spreading from the sunken cargo holds. A blackened fate no one wants to know anything about. Eleusina’s underwater ship cemetery, neglected by local authorities and the arrogance of those who exploited the city’s natural resources, is a metaphor to reflect on the environmental destruction that takes place for decades in the wider area: how the heavy industry pushed the local population towards collapse and destruction, transforming the Sacred City into Athens junkyard. Our protagonists are the locals whose life in intertwined with the town’s industrial past: Mr. Christos on the one hand, a local activist, describes to us the dire reality of living in such industrialised environment and to go against private interests that invest in the area, and Mr. Antonis on the other, who thinks that ecology is overstated and he keeps on swimming next to his shipyard.

      Eleusis, an ancient place offering hospitality to people who wanted to come to terms with the idea of death and fate, today seems like waiting to die unconditionally. Today, against the backdrop of its industrialised past, it lays motionless at its last stop, and we wonder: where do the dead ships go? Sunken is like a dive in the wounds of a city that remain hidden under the surface, a dive into Greece’s next environmental disaster, at the threshold of Eleusis’s role as European Capital of Culture 2023.

    • Partners & financing
    • GFC Development Fund
      Tangaj Film Romania
      Soil Films Germany
      Onassis Foundation
      Vasilios Tsingos Foundation
    • Beginning of shooting
    • Dec 01, 2023
    • End of shooting
    • May 16, 2024