The Island Cinema

About this book

On the island of Anthos, summer has an address: the Cine Asteri, a whitewashed courtyard of folding chairs and jasmine under the open sky, where Eleni Makri's grandfather projected films for fifty years and Eleni has projected them for ten more, on the last working carbon arc projector in the Cyclades, to audiences that shrink each season as the island's young people follow the ferries out. The cinema is dying with dignity, which does not pay the electric bill. The collection, seventy years of prints her grandfather hoarded against all sense and copyright, is worth something to collectors, and so, at the end of the worst season, Eleni does the unforgivable sensible thing: she asks an archive in London to send someone to value the reel room.