Selling more tickets in its first few weeks on the screen than all of the 18 Greek films screened during the period 2002-2003, Tassos Boulmetis’ A Touch of Spice (Politiki kouzina) even managed to bypass blockbusters Matrix Revolutions and Pirates of the Caribbean in its local market climb towards the million ticket mark.

And to top it all off, it may soon find its way to compete for an Oscar as the nation's official choice for the Best Foreign Language Oscar for 2005. The last time a Greek film was honoured with an Oscar nomination was in 1977 with Michael Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia.

Story of an uprooted boy
The semi-autobiographical story of a young Greek boy, living in the once thriving, now almost ‘extinct’, Greek-Orthodox community of Istanbul, who is expelled with his family during the Greek-Turkish conflict of the Sixties only to return years later as a visitor, has already won eight State Cinema Awards at last November’s 44th Thessaloniki International Film Festival – for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Takis Zervoulakos) and Best Music (Evanthia Remboutsika), as well as awards for set design, sound and editing. It also won the Dewars Audience award for best Greek film.

Village Roadshow Greece is behind the film, taking on a large portion of the 1.5m euro budget – a very high figure for a Greek film – and spending another 500,000 euro on a lavish marketing campaign. Haris Antonopoulos, the company’s director, was attracted to Boulmetis, for its first European production, because of his impressive career in advertising. “He knows how the public thinks and he knows about aesthetics,” Antonopoulos told Greek daily Eleftherotypia.

Dubbed the Mediterranean Like Water For Chocolate , the film weaves elements of history and politics into what is very much a story of family and home, with foods and spices posing as nostalgic storytellers. As a boy growing up in Istanbul, Fanis Iakovidis (played by George Corraface ) learns about life and love through the mysteries of cooking and the magic of spice as passed down to him from his grocer grandfather. Starting a new life in Athens, Fanis grows up to become a professor of astrophysics, while blossoming into an excellent cook. The nostalgic pull of his homeland pervades the film, through the colourful play of memory and the culinary arts. Thirty-five years later he travels back to his birthplace for his grandfather’s funeral…

Like his hero, Boulmetis –who studied film production and direction at UCLA and has been working mostly as an independent producer and director in local television advertising– was born in Istanbul in 1957, deported with his family in 1964 and returned in 1994. "It took me a long time to realise it, but I did not really feel whole until I went back to Istanbul. Going back changed my life," he told The Guardian.

Weaving on personal memories
Thousands of Greek families were deported and had their properties frozen; Boulmetis remembers how “the Turks drove us out as Greeks, and the Greeks welcomed us as Turks”. Today, there are less than 2,000 Greeks living in “Constantinople” as Istanbul is still called by Greeks.

“I felt the need to talk about Istanbul,” he said to Greek daily Kathimerini . The film (which took eight years to complete and was filmed on location in Athens, Lavrion and Istanbul) initially had stronger political elements, but eventually developed into a sort of ethnography of the people living in the Turkish metropolis. Boulmetis didn’t want to produce a “loud” film; he wanted to recreate a story that Turks could watch (the film will be screened in Turkey in March), without seeing themselves portrayed as “monsters”.

That’s when culinary habits emerged as a suitable “alibi”; thus, the emotionally charged senses of smell and taste were manipulated to comment on the “cooking up” of social and political relationships. Indeed, with a simple switch of the accent from the first “i” to the last, in the Greek title Politiki kouzina, the meaning shifts from “Constantinople” to “political” cuisine.

The film, Boulmetis’ just second feature film, is rich on social comment and touches upon the Greek-Turkish relationship, which only in late years has matured into a conscious rapprochement .