How Do You Fit 95 Years Into 70 Minutes?

It started with 170 boxes in a warehouse in Magoula.

Inside were fragments of a 95-year history: photographs, documents, records, and traces of people and events that had shaped Papastratos for almost a century. Turning that material into a 70-minute documentary meant doing much more than looking back. It meant finding the story hidden inside the archive.

Papastratos, in collaboration with Danezis Stories and with Sotiris Danezis leading the narrative strategy and direction, set out to create the first film dedicated to the company’s history. What followed was months of archival and journalistic research, 24 interviews, filming across six cities, and a long process of deciding what, from 95 years of material, ultimately belonged on screen.

Before the film, there was the archive

The first challenge was finding it.

Over the years, as the company moved and changed, its historical archive had changed locations more than once. The search took months. Eventually, the team arrived at a large warehouse in Magoula and found 170 boxes of material.

No ready-made narrative waited inside them. There was simply an inventory describing what each box contained.

That was the starting point.

Conversations about the documentary had begun shortly before the summer of 2025, when Papastratos was looking for a way to document the 95 years since the company was founded.

The first interview took place in Metsovo with Tassos Averoff, former Chairman and CEO of Papastratos and grandson of Ioannis Papastratos. It was the first time he had spoken on camera. His recollections would go on to shape several of the directions the research took over the following months.

“When Papastratos entrusted us with its story, we knew from the outset that we were dealing with one of the most important chapters in Greece’s industrial history,” says Sotiris Danezis. “As the work progressed, we realised it was also something more. It was the story of a country tested in every generation, one that repeatedly found a way to stand back up and recover what it had lost.”

Making every interview belong to the person telling it

The visual approach began with a simple principle: the setting of each interview had to tell us something about the person sitting in front of the camera.

The four-hour interview with Tassos Averoff in Metsovo is a good example. The location was chosen to reflect his relationship with the area and with the Baron Michael Tossizza Foundation, which he chairs.

Then came the light.

Sunlight streaming through the windows was interfering with the shot, so cinematographer Aris Vitalis and his team removed the windowpanes, fitted gels to control the natural light, and then put the panes back in place.

Every element of the set-up served the same purpose. The interviewee needed to be comfortable enough to sit for as long as the conversation required and, eventually, to stop thinking about the camera altogether.

“Sotiris and I have worked together for twenty years, often in situations where there isn’t even time to exchange a word,” says Vitalis, the film’s Director of Photography and Danezis’ long-time cinematographer. “That teaches you to understand what the other person needs without asking. Here, it was the opposite. We had time, and we had to use it well. We would talk beforehand about what each person represented within the story, and then I would look for the space and the light that suited them.”

Researching the history, rather than repeating it

Historical research and archival work were led by Stavros Michelis.

The 170 boxes in Magoula were only one part of the process. Material was also traced through the archives of institutions and organisations, bringing to light photographs and documents that had rarely, if ever, been widely seen.

The archive also served another purpose: verification.

Dates and events that had been repeated for decades, including in more recent press coverage, had to be checked against the original record. That meant going back to original newspaper editions from 1931 and later decades preserved on microfilm at the newspaper archive housed at the former Public Tobacco Factory on Lenorman Street.

Parts of that research process eventually became part of the film itself.

Journalistic research was led by Ioanna Louloudi, who has worked with Sotiris Danezis across his television projects for the past two decades. In Agrinio, she traced the Papastratos family’s footprint in the city and identified people whose personal accounts held pieces of the history that could not be found in a document.

Because an archive can tell you what happened. People tell you what it felt like to be there.

Twenty-four voices, six cities, one narrative

Twenty-four people appear in the documentary.

Retired employees remember the Piraeus factory. Current employees speak from Aspropyrgos. Trade union representatives, Papastratos and Philip Morris International executives, distributors, tobacco growers and a descendant of the Papastratos family each enter the story from a different point in time.

Filming took the team to Agrinio, Piraeus, Aspropyrgos, Heraklion, Metsovo and Lausanne.

Some voices naturally became bridges between different periods. Leonidas Tolis, Senior Counsel for Southeastern Europe at PMI, joined the company in April 1999 and provides continuity between past and present. Andreas Kalantzopoulos, Chairman of the Board of Philip Morris International, recounts the 2003 acquisition from the perspective of someone directly involved in the decision, including the conditions the Papastratos family set regarding the company’s employees.

“The challenge in a project like this isn’t finding people willing to talk,” says Varvara Vagianou, Production Coordinator and Account Manager at Danezis Stories. “It’s giving each person the time and space their story deserves, when one person is remembering the 1950s, and another joined the company last year. We worked closely with Papastratos management and teams throughout the process, from research and filming all the way through to the final edit.”

When memory is the only record

Some of the most powerful moments to emerge from the interviews came with no visual record at all.

No photograph. No film. No video.

They were scenes that existed only in someone’s memory.

Rather than attempt to recreate them as if they were archival material, the creative team developed a graphic-novel visual language for these moments. The illustrations were rendered in black and white, with strong contrasts between light and shadow and sharp, expressive hatching, set against a red background referencing the Papastratos visual identity.

The distinction mattered.

The audience needed to be able to enter a moment that no camera had captured without mistaking an interpretation for historical evidence.

Parts of the archive were treated through the same visual language, allowing photographs and documents to enter the film as active parts of a scene rather than remain static objects on screen.

That approach extended to everything created specifically for the documentary: the opening sequence and typography, interview name straps, the cards marking different eras, the treatment of archival imagery and the motion applied to still photographs, giving depth to images dating as far back as 1931.

The aim was consistency. Archive, graphic design and contemporary footage all had to belong to the same film.

Then came the hardest part: deciding what to leave out

The material came from very different sources and formats.

Interviews filmed across six cities. Historical photographs and documents. Illustrated scenes. Original graphic elements. Contemporary footage from the factory. People speaking from entirely different periods of the company’s history.

All of it had to become a single 70-minute narrative.

And that meant subtraction.

“Editing a project like this is largely an exercise in what you leave out,” says Kostas Christakopoulos, Head of Post-Production at Danezis Stories, who has worked with Sotiris Danezis since 2003 and has three decades of experience in the field. “You have valuable testimonies in front of you and you know that half of them will not fit. The question cannot be which one is better. It has to be which one moves the story forward. When the structure of the script is clear, you know the answer every time you have to make a cut.”

Music was developed alongside the edit rather than added once the picture was complete. Curated by Sotiris Danezis, as in all his work, it became part of the storytelling in the same way as an image, a transition or a pause.

Because across 95 years, the challenge was never simply chronology.

The film moves from the tobacco fields of Agrinio to the factory in Aspropyrgos, following a company whose trajectory repeatedly intersects with wider moments in Greece’s history.

And ultimately, that was the story the team had to find among those 170 boxes.

“For me, recording and sharing your history is a way of understanding exactly what you are before deciding what you want to become,” says Danezis. “Papastratos has an epic 95-year story, shaped by risks, pivotal decisions and the sustained efforts of management and employees to move forward and grow through major crises and difficult circumstances. That entire journey, told through a rich archive and through the testimony of the people who lived it, became the material we worked with.”