The Chora of Amorgos was built where Cycladic capitals were usually built: inland, high up, hidden from the sea and from the raiders who came from it. The result is a dense settlement of whitewashed cubic houses, vaulted passages, stepped lanes too narrow for vehicles and an extraordinary number of small chapels, folded around a bare rock on which the remains of a fortress still stand. Above the village, a row of stone windmills occupies the ridge, aligned to catch the meltemi that blows across these islands in summer - the machines that once ground the grain of a community entirely dependent on what it could grow. The film uses aerial photography to reveal the logic of the plan, invisible from the ground, and then descends into the lanes to record daily life: the whitewashing of stones, the cafés on the squares, the churches opened at dusk. It is a portrait of vernacular Cycladic architecture as a coherent system rather than a picturesque effect.
