The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel. Like the members of the idiosyncratic family at its center, the film itself chafes against custom. Its depiction of the awkward, inevitable clash of economic and social strata is simultaneous to the breakdown of filmic conventions.
Narratively, these themes are wrapped up in the potential reunion between twin siblings and the mother who walked out of their lives; though the siblings, Konstantinos and Elsa, have no idea the reunion is meant to take place before the end of their trip, nor that their father, Babis, reluctantly coordinated it. The result is a film in which nothing really happens until everything happens, a sense of anticipation that’s hinted toward in its own title.
Konstantinos Goeorgopoulos and Elsa Lekakou play the twins, named after themselves. Their chemistry is immediately apparent, though that’s no surprise; they both starred in Kioku Before Summer Comes, Charamountanis’ short film that serves as this feature’s origin and whose home video-style footage makes an appearance. They have as much chemistry between themselves as they do with Charamountanis’ camera, which acts as a privileged window into their cosmically connected souls, completely at home in their presence, and in tune with their movements. Whether they fight over a snack in the film’s opening scene or, later, synchronize ballet positions on the deck of their father’s sail boat, Konstantinos and Elsa’s uninhibited, physical intuition is the beating heart of Kyuka.
Babis, on the other hand, sublimates his emotional repression into an intense passion for fishing, which he tries, unsuccessfully, to share with his children. After losing a catch late in the film, when his festering resentment over his poor fishing skills and his general lot in life is at its most volatile, all he can do is punch the ocean. Except for a subtle, almost submarine, homophobia directed at his evidently queer son, Babis has very few weapons in his arsenal with which to reign in the only things over which he has any semblance of control — his children.
Kyuka’s photography bears all the sumptuous texture you would expect of a film of its kind. The square frame’s rounded corners evoke a home-movie aesthetic, filled with dappled sunlight bouncing off gleaming sheets of water and half-naked bodies. It’s a film about appearances as much as anything, the whole trip itself a test of Babis’ capabilities as a single father as the reunion with the estranged mother of his children bears down on him.
Of course, appearances aren’t as they seem. Babis meets with the mother of his children in secret on the first day of the holiday. His long walk from the dock to their meeting place — disorientingly stitched together from three different angles from a moving car: a tracking shot and gradual approaches from in front and behind — is the first of several instances in which Charamountanis’ interference with the solidity of the film’s construction communicates Babis’ frayed emotional state.
The estranged mother turns out to be an elegant woman Konstantinos and Elsa had met earlier that day at a bus stop. We don’t know if she recognized the friendly teens as her own children, but if she did, she doesn’t tell Babis when they come face to face. To give that away would be an announcement of her anxiety over the reunion, of her deep longing to see them; easy ammunition for Babis, with whom she still shares lingering resentments and petty insults about how they’ve aged in the intervening years.
Except for dinner, which every evening is a pathetic, tiresome helping of Babis’ catch of the day, the kids largely fend for themselves. That freedom is metered, however. Even Konstantinos, as feely expressive as he seems — he makes a cock joke in front of Babis while fishing with bait made from cock worms — is still obliged to conceal parts of himself. After spending the day with a young girl and her young mother (who we later learn, crucially, is actually her older half-sister), Babis forces Konstantinos to scratch off the polish the girl messily but lovingly painted on his nails that afternoon.
Kyuka always feels like it’s on a collision course with something. One assumes that would be the reunion between Konstantinos, Elsa, and their mother, but Charamountanis has something else planned. As the state of Babis’ insecurity becomes untenable, and as a new friend challenges his pathetic, though sympathetic, attempts to seem higher up in the world than he is, the film also breaks down. Earlier quirks of editing continuity transform into explicit tools of disorientation; separate rants become a single, incoherent argument over the origin of a meal; the grasp Babis still has on the bonds of his family becomes even more tenuous just as individual frames seem unable to adhere to the ones before and after them. Scenes play in reverse order, sometimes simultaneously with others. In Kyuka, Charamountanis has found an outlet to explore concealed intentions and unbeknownst identities that wrest, rather than repair, the bonds of a family unit.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2025.
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