Secrets of the Owl

The Secrets of the Owl is a hybrid-musical portrait of present day Athens told through the lives of three taxi drivers. The film follows the Puma, one of the oldest taxi drivers on the streets. Sunny emigrated to Greece to work as an actor but now drives long hours to support his Greek-Nigerian family and Giorgos drives and lives to sing folk-pop ballads in the late-night clubs of the city. They roam the streets to make a living, but dream of nature, acting and singing.

Puma’s pre-dawn ritual meeting with an owl, the ancient symbol of Athens of wisdom and foresight, injects magical realist elements into the film and connects him to Giorgo and Sunny’s yearnings to perform with music and theatre.

Taxi drivers are the imperfect storytellers of the streets, interweaving the personal and the political, the real and the imaginary. Through collaborative fictional scenes, the protagonists fulfil their own myths and move forward and through their problems, breaking solemn representations of a city dealing with repercussions of crises and change.This is a film about a city’s traumas and the fantasies that help its citizens to overcome them.