A Sea Captain’s Quest to Save Thousands of Lives
“4.1 Miles” brought San Francisco-based filmmaker Daphne Matziaraki back to her native Greece. There, she embedded with a Coast Guard captain and his crew as they struggled to save a seemingly-endless stream of refugees crossing the waters that connect the shores of Turkey and Greece. Published to wide acclaim in 2016, this short documentary was a thesis film for Daphne’s master’s degree from U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She spoke with us about how the film (embedded below) came to life.
The below interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.
NGP: What prompted you to make the film?
DM: Greece is my home. When the refugee crisis began to escalate, I couldn’t help but read and watch all the coverage I could find, but I still felt very distanced from it. A sense of my own comfort zone felt very present, and I thought of all the people back home, shaken out of their comfort zones when this crisis arrived at their doors. It was then that I decided to make a film about exactly that: how distanced do we feel from the world’s realities when all is safe in our immediate surroundings? What happens when this suddenly changes? Do we respond? And if so, how? I started searching for a person emblematic of this.
NGP: Which led you to the captain.
DM: Yes. The Coast Guard captain is a literal and symbolic embodiment of that shift. Getting access to the boat was a difficult, bureaucratic process, but finding Kyriakos was a reward for the months of persistent phone calls from the U.S. to Greece. Kyriakos let me into his life for three whole weeks, and in him I recognized a true hero who helped me see life differently.
NGP: Tell us more about him.
DM: Kyriakos PaPadopoulos is a 41-year-old captain of the Greek Coast Guard. He was born, and lives, in Lesbos, a Greek island just 4.1 miles off the Turkish coast. He has two young daughters who’re seven and fifteen. His job involved routine border patrol around the island. As the war in Syria worsened, his life in Greece changed dramatically. He and his crew weren’t trained to do CPR, his boat was ill-equipped, and they’d never dealt with an emergency of this scale.
NGP: Once on board, how did you shoot this?
DM: I shot on a Canon C100 Mark II and had a sound person on board with me.
NGP: Could what’s happening in Lesbos be a microcosmic reflection of the country’s general sentiment?
DM: Well, Greece is going through a tough time. It’s been in an economic recession for many years. The country lacks a fundamental infrastructure that’s necessary to deal with this crisis. Locals on the islands are overwhelmed and in a lot of ways, feel they’re alone — that the rest of the world is turning their backs on this extremely desperate situation. Asking for relief for the refugee crisis from Europe has been tough; the Greek government has failed at offering some solid solutions. There’s a feeling of helplessness that turns, often, to frustration.
NGP: Meanwhile, people like Kyriakos continue to do what they can. What happens to the refugees, once they’re rescued and arrive in Lesbos?
DM: The refugees have to register before they board the ferry to Athens. From there, they take a bus or train, hoping to make it to countries in Northern Europe. You may recall that last spring, a host of countries in the region closed their borders, and since then, tens of thousands of people have become trapped in camps in Greece, waiting on long bureaucratic procedures for a European country to grant them asylum.
NGP: Are there many Coast Guards patrolling the water? It felt as if Kyriakos and his crew were all alone.
DM: Last year, around Lesbos, there were only four Coast Guard boats of this size. There was also one from Norway, and a helicopter that helped for a bit. There were just two under-equipped ambulances on the island.
NGP: In being removed from the crisis beforehand, like most of us, and then becoming, perhaps, the closest possible to it, how has your perspective transformed?
DM: I wrote this in my original essay in the Times, and my feelings have anything but changed: I was struck by the fine lines that separate us, the moments when our paths cross fleetingly, and we look at one another for the first time and sometimes for the last…We don’t all confront the refugee crisis with the same immediacy as the Coast Guard captain does. But as our world becomes more interconnected, and more violent, we do all face a choice: would we act as he does, to save the life of stranger? Or would we turn away?
Daphne Matziaraki is a Greek documentary filmmaker who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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