Last Sunday, Yarraville’s Sun Theatre, in Melbourne’s inner west, went retro with Greek Antiques at the Sun, a screening of the 1968 film ‘A Lady in Sirtaki Dance’, in Greek, ‘Μια κυρία στα μπουζούκια’, about a poor boy who falls in love with a rich girl – a common theme in Greek cinema of the 60s and early 70s.

“We brought the Sun Theatre back to life, so to speak,” said Dean Kotsianis, one of the organisers, to Neos Kosmos.

“The film stars the sultry Zoe Laskari and the tragi-comedic everyday man Kostas Voutsas, who personifies the period. Over 100 Greeks, under 30 and middle-aged, like me, attended,” said Kotsianis.

Dean Kotsianis and his Greek Youth Generator (GYG) team are young cultural miners. Their project, Footscray’s Hidden Hellenism (FHH), seeks to unearth the western suburb’s Greek immigrant past. The screening was part of fund-raising efforts for a mural in Footscray, led by Kotsianis and his dedication to the suburb’s Greek post-war history.

Sun Theatre was one in a stable of cinemas across Melbourne run by Peter Yiannoudis and the late Stathis Raftopoulos MBE, co-founders of the Cosmopolitan Motion Pictures Company.

“Peter Yiannoudis and the late Stathis Raftopoulos, through Cosmopolitan Motion Pictures at their peak, had 12 cinemas. It’s a big story in Melbourne, a quirky part of our history and a unique artistic era.

“The early ’60s to the 70s is known as the Golden Era of Greek cinema,” said Kotsianis.

Raftopoulos arrived in Australia at age 13 and, by 1949, had begun to shape the Greek Australian cultural landscape by showing Greek cinema. Yiannoudis assisted Kotsianis and the GYG team in transforming the Sun into a cinema of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

“You don’t see films like that today – and for my generation, we’ve never seen them; they are new and tell a different story of Greece.”

Greek films playing in suburban working-class migrant areas, in that period became a key source of community engagement, cultural consumption, and family for the large working class of Greek immigrants.

For many young ones who grew up in the 70s, the Saturday Greek cinema meant two films, Maltesers, crisps, and Choc Tops during the interval. Then sugar fuelled chaos up and down the aisles until they all dropped exhausted into sleep across the leather-bound rows of wooden cinema seats.

At a time of limited television and a few Greek papers, cinema became a pivotal link to Greece for the early migrant. The ‘Golden Era’ of Greek cinema, personified by Greece’s answer to Brigit Bardot, Aliki Vougiouklaki, wanted to reflect a post-war aspirational middle class and the comedic tension between tradition and modernity.

“The film was refreshing and new for me; despite the film being old, the more we get away from things in time, the more attractive they become.

“I am discovering those movies for the first time,” said Kotsianis.

Kotsianis says the “Western,” or American, “influence comes through the films in the form of big American cars, modern dress.”

In the late 60s and up to the mid-70s, when the Colonels’ Junta crushed Greek freedom, there could be no reflection or critique of Greece. Gritty, realist, sexually challenging, ironic, satirical, and surrealist cinema could only be made outside Greece, like ‘Z’ by Costa-Gavras. The Golden Age of Greece offered a halcyon fantasy of Greece through melodramas, romcoms, and choreographed dance scenes by American versions of Greeks. At the same time, it was the launch of an industry and many careers. It may have also paved the way for the poetic work of auteur Theodoros Angelopoulos in the 80s, an antidote to the Golden Era of Greek cinema, and the new Greek Weird Wave, led by dystopian films like Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos in the 00s.

Kotsianis says, “Greek cinema at that time was pitching to the diaspora; it was one of the few ways to connect with Greece,” and adds, “It is also about the art of reflection.”

Importantly, Sun Theatre and others and the films they presented are of significant historical and cultural importance. They represent a period of mass migration and settlement by Greeks, building a community around regular Saturday film showings.

Kotsianis and his team, through their projects, pay service to intangible and intergenerational memory.

“It was another time here when the community huddled around cultural events like the Saturday cinema at Sun Theatre.”