Sokrates Kapsaskis

Sokrates Kapsaskis was a Greek poet, film director, historian and translator. He was born on the island of Zante. In 1938 he left Zante to live at his grandfather's house on the Peloponnesus, where he met the poets Takis Sinopoulos, Giorgos Pavlopoulos and 'Gavriel Pentzikis'. Together they published poems, essays and various translations. He later joined the Resistance during the Civil War. He moved to Athens after the war, where he published some of his poems in the art magazine "O Aionas Mas". In 1953 he published his first books of poetry, "Aesthesis" (Feelings) and in 1955 "Efimerida" (Newspaper). In 1954 he married Viktoria Kapsaski and together they left for Paris, where he studied film directing at the IDHEC. He returned to Athens in 1956, where he made 13 films until 1966. During the shooting of his last film, The Hot Month of August (1966), he met American director Doris Wishman, who acquired the distribution rights for the film. Without his consent, Wishman changed the story, added nude scenes and sexier dialog, and for more than 40 years it would circulate at drive-ins and midnight screenings with the tagline, "He blew her cool . . . she blew his . . . and her husband blew all in". After the late 1960s military coup in Greece, he stopped making films and opened an ArtCinema called "Studio". His films include "The Hot Month of August" and One Street Organ, One Life (1958). He won the Aristeion Prize in 1992 for his Greek translation of James Joyce's "Ulysses". He died on 28 August 2007 due to complications following triple-bypass heart surgery.