[Previously on TTC: Here, at home, dwelled the past in all its tormenting glory, haunting me like a curse. Within the walls of my own dwelling and the areas I frequented and the people I knew. Where I went to relax and be ‘me.’]
I was born and raised in Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, conflict, love and earthquake; the land of stereotypes, gossip, old habits and ghosts, where you are who your family was, who people expect you to be, with no real room for maneuvering, reinvention, or personal aspirations that exceed the established way of doing things.
Cyprus is a place of business, tourism, trade and politics, and I had plenty of past and present in all of them, by proxy, through my family’s actions, but no professional interest in any of them. My inclinations lay elsewhere, in the fields of human behavior, film, art, revolution, in jackhammered horizons and breached boundaries. My disposition was effortlessly irreverent, my inclination provocative by nature. There was little room for me in Cyprus, if any, at least none that accommodated me as an individual with personal ambitions beyond what had been prescribed for me.
I decided to move away and do all the things I couldn’t do, or wasn’t supposed to do, or shouldn’t have done, including the production of movies in the USA. Because I wanted to. I loved proving the naysayers wrong. I wanted to live out my life, not someone else’s.
Watch this space for Part 4