Stella Grammenos-Dimadis Blog

Freedom and the Migrant Experience " The secret to happiness is freedom...And the secret to freedom is courage." Thucydides 460-395 B.C The online series, Migrant Stories, is about to conclude with anther two interviews to go and then it will be a few months in the edit suite to complete Series 4 & Series 5.  In May last year, I committed to the idea of creating a series of Migrant Stories, inspired mainly by the stories that we were losing and not recording here in Australia due to the ageing population of Migrants, considering so many came to Australia during the Post War years.  I figured I would dedicate 12 months of my filmmaking time to do this- and this I have done.  With the last of the interviews to be aired between April and May of 2018. In all, there will be 30 stories.  At this stage, I wanted to share that there were a number of common threads between each and every person that was interviewed, and to take a moment to reflect on this.  In doing

"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Walt Disney I just got back from attending the screening of Memories of a Doll at the 11th Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, which was absolutely amazing and held at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.  Thank you to everyone that helped bring this program together.  It was unforgettable!  It is such a joy to see a film that you had vehemently supported, come to life on the big screen.   Coupled with the 11th LAGFF, I also attended the Produced By conference in LA, which is run by the Producer's Guild of America.  It was the second time that I had gone to this conference and for the second time the conference didn't disappoint.  This year it was held at Fox Studios and always such a great place to be whilst learning about film, for it's surrounds allows you to be a total dreamer about the future of content, this

Migrant Stories "I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you're going to have to work twice as hard." Lin-Manuel Miranda Twice as hard in anything that you have to do, that is what being a migrant is all about.  I arrived in Australia as a baby, so in a lot of ways, it is as if I was born in this  country, but not quite.  I lived in a world that was inherently Greek, with a work ethic that was austere, and as a little girl I had to follow suite to make sure that I was able to keep up.  My parents worked in factories, as hard as any other migrant who arrived in Australia.  They had a goal, and that was to save for a house, for without owning a house the rest cannot follow, priority number one.  Priority number two fell on me, and that was to study hard.  "Να διαβάσεις"  Sometimes I had to create extra work for myself, pretending that Enid Blyton was on the curriculum, or that the poster sprawled on the kitchen table was for

Lifting Clouds  Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides. -Lao Tzu Director's Statement-Lifting Clouds For the past few years I had been thinking about the definitives in life.  But, no matter how hard I thought about it, there were no ‘definitives’ as such, except one ‘definite’, and that was, once we were born, we were all on the way to a death of    some sort.  It was such a grim thought, but, it was what got me thinking about the types of deaths that humans have and whether there could be some control with the way that humans die.  After all, there is control in every other aspect of the human life, so why the persistence in leaving human deaths to chance, particularly when they are imminent and obvious.  Pets’ deaths, when they are terminally ill,  are not left to chance.  Pets are surrounded by their family, swaddled in blankets and love for their final goodbye.  Yet humans, are never given this luxury. Some countri

"Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. "   Corrie Ten Boom Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker, who had helped many Jews escape during the Holocaust, was a prisoner and then a writer.  She held many memories, no doubt, fears; images that would stay forever and haunt her, but they were able to unlock a future for her that she would never have imagined.  Her writing and her boldness initiated her knighthood by the Queen of the Netherlands, The King's College in New York City named a new women's house in her honour, her book "The Hiding Place", was  made into a feature film, twice. Locked away in our computer hard drives are examples of our work and lives that we lock away when our computer sleeps, forgetting about their importance because we are always told to focus on the now, forgetting about our past.  Well, perhaps it is time that we also learn to love our past, regardless of what it was like, so that we can understand what our