Yiorgos Mesimeris | αγόρι μου (Agori mou) (My Boy) / 2025

a letter sent to the sidewalk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yiorgos Mesimeris (screenwriter and director) αγόρι μου (Agori mou) (My Boy) / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

Starring Xaris Karydis and Christos Tzovaras, My Boy is more of anguished memory than a structured narrative.

   A man finds a letter on the Athens, Greece street and reads it. It is a letter from a military boy to his male lover Nikos back home, in which he reiterates his love, while also hinting that perhaps his lover has begun to forget him. He meanwhile is seeking a temporary leave so that he might visit his lover.

    Was the letter ever received by its intended recipient? Or was it dropped before it was even delivered. Whatever the answer, it leads to an emotional upheaval in the reader who in this short 9-minute Greek film, remembers his last meeting with his own lover on a beach.

     The narrative, such as it is, is based on a letter he suddenly begins to write to his long-lost lover, an epistle which he suggests might never even be mailed, ending up like a whisper of sheets in the wind like the one his has found on the street.

     There are several lovely picture-perfect moments, a brief quote from the gay poet Constantine P. Cavafy, and lots of accompanying music, but little here, alas, of real substance. The film is inspired by real events that are evidently so personal that, except for the imagined images, we are permitted no entry, leaving us with the experience of briefly looking over the shoulder of the lover at a metaphoric scrapbook.

Los Angeles, October 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).