The Cast
KETTY KORAKA
Ketty Sigala-Koraka was born 15 December 1955 on the island of Santorini. She grew up in Athens after her parents divorced. She has lived with her own family in the city of Chania on the island of Crete since 1974. She married when she was still a student, and entered the Law School of the University of Athens while pregnant. Ultimately, she remained an eternal student, leaving the university with just two unfinished courses in order to open a pre-school in Chania. There, since 1981, she has cared for many generations of “her children,” whom she dearly loves. All her life she has engaged in theater and puppetry, and has organized performance groups for students and the elderly. She was a founding member of the Chania Theater Workshop, the city's first theater group, as well as of the Arena group theater and the A Student Theater. In 2012 she founded a theater company, the Girls of Old Town, engaging women of ages 90 to 55 in comedy shows for which Ketty wrote the scripts and directed, and which regularly packed the Odeion Theater (Venezelio Conservatory) in Chania, and toured to Santorini. Among her films, Ketty has acted in five shorts and features by Cretan filmmaker Yiannis Krommydakis. She was for decades a popular radio personality on both state-funded and commercial radio, and is often asked to emcee pubic events. Ketty first crossed paths with Oksana Mysina in 2017 when Oksana joined the Girls of Old Town. Ketty plays a leading role in Oksana's film On the Road to Antigone, now in post-production. Ketty's fame in Chania stretches far and wide, but her annual Christmas tour of the city is legendary – for three days, she dons a Santa Claus suit and drives back and forth all over the city delivering gifts to all of her friends. Ketty makes crafts from stones, fabric, wood & paper, and sells these handmade crafts at charity bazaars to support the needy. She has many good friends, which, she says, is why she "feels like the richest woman in the world.”
MAGDALENA PLONKA
Magdalena Plonka was born July 3, 1990, in Kraków, Poland, the third of four siblings. According to family legend, when her father first saw her, he asked if the baby was healthy. “I weighed less than 4 kg,” Magdalena explains, “and, to put it mildly, I didn't dazzle with beauty.”
She spent her childhood in Radziszów, the family village near Kraków. She remembers that time as “pleasant and carefree, like a children's adventure series.” As life's harsher aspects came into focus, she often escaped into dreams related to dance, stage, and performances. She played badminton and volleyball for the school team, but dance was her greatest passion. She joined a ballroom dance course, although she found it difficult to balance her hobbies with her studies and the arduous commutes into Kraków.
Eventually, she says, “I managed to return to the world of dreams, which had always been dance. In 2018, I discovered kizomba – a dance originating in Angola, which has expanded its horizons to many subgenres in Europe. I dance to this day. Not professionally, but for passion. Without pressure, just for pleasure. I have met many wonderful people and participated in numerous festivals.”
After graduating high school in Kraków, she entered the University of Economics. “Standing at a crossroads,” she explains, “I didn't know what direction to take in life. I randomly chose Tourism and Recreation, developing my passion for travel which began when I accepted a student internship on the island of Kos in Greece. Since then, I travel to Greece almost every year. I especially fell in love with Crete. My affection for the country transferred to members of my family. I accompanied my mother Renata to one of her painting exhibitions in 2018, and we met Oksana Mysina and John Freedman. Shortly thereafter, to my surprise, Oksana offered me a role in a film she planned to shoot. Thus began our collaboration and friendship. Each time I visited Crete, we would work on new scenes in the film. During that time, I lived for awhile in Naples and traveled a great deal. I returned to Krakow in 2022, where I currently live and work as a Recruitment Specialist at Techniche Global Ltd, and occasionally venture into the world of the stage.”
EFTICHIOS KANDANOLEON
Eftichios Kandanoleon was born in 1967 in the south of Crete in the small mountain village of Prodromi – “population 7 during the summer, 4 in the winter.” His parents moved to the city of Chania a few years after his birth. He studied Business Administration at New York University. When he returned to Greece, after his studies in 1991, he married his high school sweetheart, Karetina Theodoulou, at the age of 25. They have 3 children, 2 boys, and a girl. He has worked in real estate, and for 9 years he had a private importing company of paper goods. For the last 15 years he has been the managing director of an aluminum producing company. He has always been interested in the arts, in how art can enrich one's life, and make it more meaningful. He has been an active member of Chania's cultural life for the past 15 years, taking part in book presentations, and book readings. Over the last decade, Eftichios has actively performed in amateur theater on the island of Crete, performing usually in his hometown of Chania, but also in the cities of Heraklion and Rethymno. His performances have included roles in Zoe Skalidis's My Life with a Puppeteer, Despina Trachalaki's Elephants and Insects, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and Ioannis Kondylakis's Patouchas – all in 2023; Pantelis Prevelakis' The Volcano and Yannis Kalatzopoulos's The Emperor's New Clothes in 2021; Neil Simon's Fools in 2020; Dimitrios Byzantios's Women in Charge in 2019; Éric Puybaret's The Moonslayer in 2018; Polychroni Koutsakis's When He Was Happy in 2017; Alekos Galanos's Red Lights in 2016; and Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and Xenia Kalogeropoulou's The Slave in 2015. Oksana Mysina first crossed paths with Eftichios when Ketty Koraka took her to see a performance of The Moonslayer.
EVELINA SCHATZ
Evelina Schatz was born in Odessa (formerly the USSR, now Ukraine), where the West meets the East and the sea fuses with the steppe, from parents of different cultures. She graduated with degrees in the History of Art from Lomonosov Moscow State University, and the University of Milan. She comes from an artistic family and, since 1998, has divided her time between Milan and Moscow. A bilingual poet, she writes in Italian and Russian. An artist, performer, essayist, journalist, historian, art critic, curator, director and set designer, her essays, articles, poems, narrative texts and plays have been published in Italy, Russia and in other countries. Her works can be found in the museums and collections of various countries. Continuing the traditions of the futurists and Samizdat, she has created two tiny and precious publishing houses, kãrwãnSamizdat and CaffèLADOMIR, personally looking after their design. Evelina the artist embodies the words of Evelina the poet. In the twilight of her life she will be the librarian “in the Hotel Bounty of her musician friend Matteo Cappelletti, on Pitcairn island in the Pacific.”
Her selected exhibits include 2012 Orbita implacabile, Open Club Gallery, Moscow (2012); Capriccio del cerchio, solo exhibition, Galleria Quintocortile, Milan (2010); Teatro in carta, solo exhibition and music concert with Schatz’s poems, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009); Portrait of a Poet, solo exhibition with exhibit of photographs/portraits of Katja Golitzyna, Russian State Literary Museum, Moscow (2003).
Over the years she has worked with some of the great artists of the 20th century, including Russian theater director Yury Lyubimov and the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. She speaks in Italian and Russian in A Woman and her Angels and is the author of the semi-improvised monologues that she delivers in the film. Her story about "Eduardo" in the film is, in fact, a reminiscence of a encounter with the great Italian writer, actor and director Eduardo de Filippo.
“It’s not boundaries that influence or change people,” Evelina says. “Living life is not a geographical concept. Not completely. A person is who they are in the Fiji islands or on the Aeolian islands. What is important is the history of one’s destiny. I live in a world without borders. Poetry and Art have no boundaries, but they have the power to leave a mark on the world.”
KONSTANTINOS VERONIKIS
Konstantinos Veronikis lives in Chania, Crete, Greece, where he is active in amateur theater. Among other productions he has performed in: Zoe Skalidis's My Life with a Puppeteer in 2023; Giula Kanitsaki's Memory in 2022; Pantelis Prevelakis' The Volcano in 2021; Éric Puybaret's The Moonslayer in 2018; and Polychroni Koutsakis's When He Was Happy in 2017. Oksana Mysina first made his acquaintance in 2018 when she saw him perform a strongman in The Moonslayer.
KORA
Kora is a purebred German Shepard, born and raised in Dnipro, Ukraine, by her family, the Hetmanenkos. Her life changed drastically when Russia invaded Ukraine. Her master Vadim Hetmanenko went to war, and her mistress Anna Hetmanenko fled to safety with her mother and son in Greece. Oksana Mysina made an award-winning short documentary about that, Escape, in 2022. Kora made her brief film debut in Escape, while her talent warranted one of the leads in A Woman and her Angels.
VIKTOR KORKIYA
&
LYUDMILA NEKRASOVA
Viktor Korkiya (the Poet) and Mila Nekrasova (the Muse) are a husband-and-wife team.
Viktor is an ethnic Georgian, Russian-language poet and playwright. His 1988, Perestroika-era tragifarce I, Soso Dzhugashvili punctured the myth of Joseph Stalin, and took Russia by storm with productions in 70 cities. Oksana Mysina staged his plays Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the Island of Taganrog (2001) and Ariston (2004) in Moscow. Viktor was the poetry editor at the famed Youth magazine in the 1970s. Dmitry Bykov, one of Russia's best and most popular writers today, wrote this about Korkiya in 2022: "But Korkiya was - and remains today, 40 years on - a major poet, perhaps the best of his generation."
Mila is a Moscow-born filmmaker and theater pedagogue. She was the dean of the theater department at the Slavyansky University in Moscow from Y:EAR TO YEAR. She made a series of documentary films about provincial museums for the Russian Culture Channel. She and Oksana Mysina first crossed paths in the early 1980s where they both acted in Vyacheslav Spesivtsev's Moscow Youth Theater.
Vitya and Mila have a daughter, Nastya, who made an award-willing film, I Am Happy, about her mother's grueling battle with cancer with shamans in the jungles of Peru and doctors in the hospitals of Moscow in the late 2010s. Mila was still in the process of beating her cancer when, a few years ago, she and Viktor visited Crete. Oksana immediately put them both in her film.
Incidentally, the story of having a baby that Ketty Koraka tells in the film's scene in the hair salon, is a half-true retelling of Nastya's appearance on Earth.
THEOFANIS
NIKOLOUPOLOS,
MARIA VIZYRAKI
& THE HAIR LAB
Fanis and Maria are the owners of a hair salon, the Hair Lab, at the far eastern corner of Old Town in Chania, Crete, right in front of the stunning and ancient Sabbionara bastion, built by the Venetians in 1595 at the edge of the Sea of Crete. They were an item when they were young and then they lost one another, having no idea what had happened to the other. In time Fanis went to live and work in London, and, at some point, Maria did the same. Imagine their surprise when, each now happily possessing their own partners, they ran into one another one day in on the streets of London Town. They began talking and realized they had a dream they could still make happen together - to open their own hair salon.
Their hospitality - and hard work! - on the day of the Woman and her Angels shoot in their salon was nothing short of astonishing. They invited in a whole salon of friends and children, shut the doors to the public and proceeded to do everything that was asked of them - and, if it wasn't asked, but they saw it was necessary, they did that too.
These are two very cool customers as the film clearly shows.
MARGIE JUDD
Margie Judd is something of an island-hopper. At the time that the hair salon scene of A Woman and her Angels was being shot in Chania, Crete, Margie was in town, visiting from her home in the Hawaiian Islands. She was enlisted to play the part of Charon's Ticket-taker, and since she is Oksana Mysina's sister-in-law, she had little choice but to agree.
NEKTARIA KRASAKI,
PAVLINA KOULA
& INOMAGIRIO
The Inomagirio restaurant located at Polychronidi 60 in Chania, near the corner of the Venizelou main drag in the Koum Kapi area, is the entire neighborhood's place for home cooking away from home. Owner Nektaria Krasaki and her constant helper Pavlina Koula are always ready with a smile, a good word, and great food. Oksana Mysina never had any doubt where she would go for a scene to express the celebration of her main heroine's return to life in A Woman and Her Angels. And when we shared our idea with Nektaria, she immediately agreed, called in a bunch of local guests - including her beautiful daughters * and *, made up a bunch of food, and we were off.
UKRAINIAN FAMILY
Vladyslav Hetmanenko, Nataliia Bratus, and Anna Hetmananko appeared in Chania well after filming of A Woman and her Angels had begun. But they gave Oksana Mysina an excellent idea for expanding the film's scope and awareness of the film. It is impossible to imagine the film without them now. Anna (right) is featured in Oksana's award-winning documentary short Escape, in which Anna tells the story of her family's chaotic escape from Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. Nataliia Bratus (center) is Anna's mother, and Oksana's cousin. Nataliia has been an important helper to John Freedman in dozens of translating projects involving contemporary Ukrainian drama. Some of her collaborations with John are published in the anthology, A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights. Vladyslav (left) is Nataliia's grandson and Anna's son. He aided John in the translation of Andriy Bondarenko's play Ghost Land, which is available in published form.