Paradise Lost

Yolanda Markopoulou / Yolanda Markopoulou, Titus Kreyenberg & Konstantina Stavrianou / Greece & Germany

The Great Fire of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922 is one of the darkest moments in the tumultuous history of the Greek-Turkish relations. As a consequence of the complex global and local geopolitical powerplay, two million people of Greek descent, crossed the Aegean Sea, same path refugees need to take today.

Based on a family archival letter, the director traces the last minutes of her great great grandfather’s life as a political prisoner while his wife had to leave everything behind and flee with her two children. He was imprisoned the night before the Great Fire breaks out. He was held in a room in the city’s guardhouse by the Turkish Army and killed the next day.

In this mixed reality experience, the viewer wearing a headset enters into a 1922 café . In the course of the story interchanging between the physical and the virtual world, through interaction with objects, the viewer will step into different vignettes of that time and into the shoes of our two characters Nikolaos and Iphigeneia. Through their POV’s and those of other secondary characters the story will unfold.
The children of the family face their loss of innocence coping with death for the first time, a street vendor is selling tea for a last time, a woman safe, from a a warship across the coastline is viewing the great fire through her opera binoculars, a trumpet player as part of a philharmonic orchestra on the ship is dictated to play as loud as he can so the screams of the people trying to survive at the port across, cannot be heard anymore…
Tthrough this family story, one, will experience the last moments of the destruction of this ‘paradise’ city traveling in and out of archive footage. In the experience, the use of hand tracking will allow audience members to interact with both real and virtual objects. Image tracking will be used to pin virtual images and meshes to physical objects.

The story has derived from a deep research of historical archives, films, interviews with historians and second and third generation descendants of refugees. The locations that are used are recreated through 3D animation. They are based on the actual locations the story takes place in Smyrna. We are taking the actual architectural designs from an significant research that was completed recently, pictures and drawings and reproducing them into the 3D environment. This combined with archive material will create a mixed reality experience where the historical footage will find a new life into this narrative. We are experimenting on ways the historical materials can be seen in an innovative way into the recreated virtual world engaging the viewer deeply and leading him through this poetic voyage. The found footage comes from super8 family archives, the Hellenic Broadcaster, the British as well as the French Gaumont Pathe.
Paradise Lost will be an innovative mix of AR with fully immersive VR. The audience transitions from being in a physical installation to a virtual cityscape in Smyrna by combining archival photography with illustration, 3D modelling, and motion capture, creating a unique and immersive environment.
Our goal is to reach younger audiences and inspire them to dive deep into a historical event and connect with what is happening in the world now.