Zorba by Juan Galán

Issue 173

Zorba is a documentary journey into existentialism based on Nikos Kazantzakis' literary work –and its subsequent film adaptation– Zorba the Greek, which explores the meaning of life with a contemporary portrait of Greece by analyzing its history, politics, patriotism, knowledge, work, religion, social and moral issues, art, family, and relationships.

According to existentialism, we are free agents who go through life without social, moral, or divine limits. It is entirely up to each individual to assign meaning to his or her own life. In the novel Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis symbolically brings together, through the characters, the two faces of a philosophical dualism to combine or contrast them: Reason and Passion. The first is the belief of understanding and feeling things only through the filter of the intellect that transposes reality, that measures and theorizes all kinds of experiences and sociological barriers. The second, is the surrender to circumstances without reflection, opening ourselves to the here and now with decision and with all our being. 

Zorba explores the struggle between the rational and the aesthetic, the life of the mind and the life of the emotions, the pain and the beauty of existence. It is a mirror in which we see reflected our miseries and also our riches, as happens in any narrative that could have been created about the activity of people, in all civilizations and periods of humanity, which is repeated in everyday life with the same components; culminating this work as a hymn to vitality, to the enjoyment of the immediate, of everything that is not usually given importance, where the greatest pleasures are often found in the simplest things. 

Juan Galán (he/him) lives and works in Bari, Puglia, Italy.
juangalan.net | @juangalan