ACT I
The Fractured Home
The government orders a sudden civilian evacuation of Filakton village. Children are separated from adults. Christos sends Evangelia and Marianthi away on the buses and makes the agonizing choice to stay behind.
A feature film
Marianthi
Written by Evan Langston
Based on the childhood true stories of Marianthi Chatzopoulou Langston
Logline
A family torn from its land.
When a post-WWII civilian evacuation tears a Macedonian village apart, separating a devoted father from his wife and young daughter, he refuses to abandon their land. Left behind in a ghost town, he must wage a silent, perilous war of survival against a brutal guerrilla faction to keep his home standing for his family’s return.
The Historical Canvas
Macedonia, 1944
The global war has ended, but a fractured localized civil war is erupting between government forces and communist factions, leaving innocent border villages caught in the crossfire.
Theme
The Unseen Scars
While the history books focus on armies and borders, Marianthi focuses on the invisible toll of conflict—the quiet trauma of displaced mothers, the stolen childhoods of evacuated kids, and the heavy silence of those left behind.
Writer’s Note
Giving a silenced history its voice back.
“Growing up, my mother always told me she had so many stories to tell. As a child, I ignored them. But years later, after her passing, and then my father’s, the silence they left behind started filling up with the echoes of the things she used to say.
I began remembering the fragments of her childhood survival during the Greek Civil War, the forced evacuations, and the sheer resilience of her family. I realized those stories shouldn’t have died with her. I wrote Marianthi because I wanted to give my mother her voice back, and to ensure that the memory of what her generation endured is preserved forever.”
— Evan Langston