Biography

Kostas Vrettakos (Greek: Κώστας Βρεττάκος, 1938–2018), son of Nikiforos Vrettakos, was born in Athens and studied cinema in Greece and Italy. In addition to cinema, he earned a living as a publishing editor, producer of commercials and, occasionally, a journalist. During the Dictatorship, he worked as a translator of popular novels and as a photographer for encyclopedias. Early literary collaborations with the Art Review were followed by two poetry collections in 1971 and 1977 under the title Anaritma. In parallel with his photographic activity, he began to write scripts and direct his own films, of which the documentary The Layer of Destruction (1980) and the only feature film of his career, The Children of the Swallow (1987) stood out. At the same time, he founded the publishing house Tria Fylla. In 1989, he began to deal with the political management of Greek cinema, initially as Special Advisor for Cinematography of the Ministry of Culture (1989), then as president of the Greek Film Center (1991–1998) and finally as representative of Greece at Eurimages, the Council of Europe (1991–2006). In 2009 he published the novel Passerby from Reykjavik (Potamos Publications) and in 2016 the prose collection Exercises of Curiosity (Potamos Publications), which was awarded the Petros Haris Foundation Prize of the Academy of Athens. In 2018 he published a poetry collection of his youthful poems entitled Added Value (Polis Publications). He died in Athens on 6 November 2018, at the age of 80.