By sheer serendipity, I watched Christopher Nolan's new film, The Odyssey, far from the madding crowd of Hollywood hype, in a small Greek town called Markopoulo Mesogaias.
A historic little municipality in the East Attica region of Greece, it is a 15-minute ride from the temple ruins of the fifth-century BCE Sanctuary of Artemis at Vravrona (ancient Brauron), dedicated to the goddess of wild nature and childbirth.
Artemis is also the name of the cinema where we sat to see Sir Christopher Nolan's new film, located right behind the splendid Saint John Orthodox Church of Markopoulo, built in 1904. You can't get more Greek than this!
We sat there with about two dozen local Greeks in a splendid theatre, nowhere near the Imax hyperbole marketed through millions of dollars in advertising, trying to turn the film into a historic spectacle.
Entirely unfazed by the grand hoopla, this little cinema in this little Greek town actually gave an old-fashioned "intermission" in the middle of the film, for bathroom breaks and popcorn.
