Following its successful participation in FIRST LOOK’s Working on It Sessions at the Museum of the Moving Image this March, my multimedia lecture performance UNSETTLED returns for one night only at the legendary Cinema Village theater in Manhattan.
Entry is free. To register click here.
UNSETTLED by Argyro Nicolaou
Thursday 24 April 2025 @ 7:45pm
Cinema Village 22 E 12th St. NY 10003
In this one-hour long live documentary performance, filmmaker Argyro Nicolaou combines still and moving images to tell a deeply personal story of displacement and intergenerational memory.
The town of Varosha on the eastern coast of Cyprus, where Nicolaou's mother is from, was fenced off by the occupying Turkish military for 46 years. Since the Greek-backed coup d’etat and Turkish invasion of 1974 that divided the island and displaced a third of its population, Varosha was neither settled nor demolished. It turned into a “ghost town”.
In 2006, a family member entered the town undetected, snuck into the family’s ancestral home, and recovered a childhood diary that belonged to Nicolaou’s mother. This was the closest Nicolaou came to witnessing her mother’s life before she was displaced, until October 2020, when the Turkish military opened Varosha to the public, and the two women were able to visit the town together for the first time.