In celebration of what would have been Mikis Theodorakis’s 100th birthday -the legendary composer behind Zorba’s Dance and the scores for Lumet’s Serpico and Costa-Gavras’s Z and State of Siege– the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association, in collaboration with the Echo Reading Series, is hosting a screening of the Irish documentary An Buachaill Gealghaireach. This trilingual film explores the remarkable journey of the song The Laughing Boy / Το Γελαστό Παιδί and how it came to embody the spirit of freedom in both Ireland and Greece.
Please join us on Thursday, October 30th at 7pm, Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.for this special screening, as well as a musical tribute to Theodorakis by the Chijazz Band.
The Irish song entitled “The Laughing Boy” was written by a teenage rebel called Brendan Behan in memory of another iconic rebel, Michael Collins – the centenary of whose death was commemorated in 2022. But this song also had an extraordinary and dramatic afterlife as “To Yelasto Paidi,” the powerful left-wing anthem of resistance against the dictatorship that ruled Greece in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Translated by the poet Vasilis Rotas, Behan’s words in Greek were set to music by the legendary Mikis Theodorakis. The song remains an enduring and potent cultural force in the heart of Greece today. The film takes poet Theo Dorgan on an odyssey of his own, as he attempts to uncover the truth of the story behind the song. It is a narrative that interweaves the tragic and bloody birth pangs of both modern Ireland and modern Greece. But these histories are also bound together by something more profound and transcendent: the power of a song.
FREE ADMISSION. Please RSVP before October 25th to reserve your seat here:
https://www.hcaao.org/event-details/documentary-music-an-buachaill-gealghaireach-to-gelasto-paidi