Η Δημόσια Ιδιωτική Οικία: 9 στροφές για την Αθήνα | Τάσος Λάγγης

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Four young women share a penthouse on Acharnon Street, in a neighbourhood of intense ethnic and social layering, and try to stay together in a city that changes faster than they can follow. That is the thread through Η Δημόσια Ιδιωτική Οικία: 9 στροφές για την Αθήνα (The Public Private House: 9 Stanzas for Athens), the documentary by Tassos Langis that screens on the Main Stage of Onassis Stegi on Tuesday 1 December 2026 at 20:30, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.

Langis has been filming the Athenian apartment building for years. With Giannis Gaitanidis he co-directed Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens, which premiered at the Athens International Film Festival in 2021 and won Best Film at the Cinema Urbana architecture film festival in Brasília in 2022. The Public Private House is an Onassis Culture production. It had its world premiere on 9 March 2026 at the 28th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and this screening is its premiere in Athens, the city, as the Onassis programme puts it, it was made for.

This is a screening for people who want to argue about the city afterwards: architects and urbanists, tenants who have watched their rent climb, students sharing flats because nothing else is affordable, and anyone raised in a polykatoikia who still knows which neighbour plays the piano at midnight.

The setting is the Main Stage, the largest hall at Onassis Stegi on Syngrou Avenue, turned into a cinema for the night. The vibe is part screening, part public debate, since the conversation with Langis is built into the evening. The sound is a polyphony of voices, residents and scholars heard on equal terms. The door is ticketed through Onassis Stegi.

Langis structures the film like a piece of music or a poem in nine stanzas; the Onassis programme calls it a polyphonic urban essay. His statement starts from a question he calls simple and impossible: what does it mean to inhabit today? He names what presses on Athens now, the economic and housing crises, soaring rents, gentrification, touristification, homes turned into investment products, and sets against it the polykatoikia, whose anarchic yet deeply social construction still proposes another way of living together, a form of daily democracy. The camera works from inside and without hierarchy: academics appear without titles or roles, alternating on equal terms with the four women, their friends, and the bird species that share the city. The title comes from The Public Private House, a study of the Athenian apartment building.

If you want a documentary that delivers a tidy thesis and a policy conclusion, Langis refuses that shape. But if you live in an Athenian block of flats and have ever wondered what holds its residents together, these nine stanzas are addressed to you.

Onassis Stegi is at Syngrou Avenue 107-109, a short walk from Syngrou-Fix metro station. The ticket price was not published on the Onassis listing at the time of writing; check onassis.org before you go. The discussion with Langis follows straight after the credits, so plan the evening beyond the film itself rather than booking a late dinner around the screening's start time.

A film about how Athenians share a building, shown to Athenians for the first time, with the director in the room to answer for every stanza.