Greece’s Dark History in BENEATH THE OLIVE TREE with Stavroula Toska & Olympia Dukakis

Guest Bio

Stavroula Toska is the award winning director of Beneath the Olive Tree, a feature documentary based on journals found buried beneath an olive tree and tell the stories of thousands of women kept in concentration camps and jails during the Greek Civil War. After getting over the shock of discovering that her maternal grandmother had been one of these women, she decided to make her own journey of digging for the truth part of the film.

Stavroula likes to refer to herself as the “accidental filmmaker”, only to go on saying that she doesn’t believe in accidents. She was raised in Sindos, a small town near Thessaloniki, Greece. At the age of seven she announced to her family and friends that one day she’d move to New York so she can “..be in the movies where everyone leaves in a big house”. Everyone laughed with the exception of her mother who dreaded the thought that this day would come sooner than later.

Soon after graduating with a degree in Marketing and PR she moved to Athens to follow her true passion; to study and pursue a career as an actor. Stavroula went on to co-star in two of the most successful soap operas in Greek tv history. Just when things started to feel good and safe she booked a one way ticket to the Big Apple. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and co-starred in a couple of low budget films and some off-Broadway shows. It wasn’t until Stavroula met Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis that she thought of herself as a storyteller. After all, it was Dukakis who first told Stavroula about the women whom Beneath the Olive Tree is based on, and promised her she’d do everything in her power to help her bring these stories to the world. Dukakis did that and then some, serving as the Narrator and Executive Producer for the film.

Stavroula was awarded the Grand Jury Van Vlahakis Award for Most Innovative Filmmaker at the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival in June 2015 for her work on Beneath the Olive Tree.

BENEATH THE OLIVE TREE is a deeply-moving, personal, and eye-opening documentary focuses on the true stories of women exiled to Trikeri Island; the biggest women’s concentration camp during the Greek Civil War (1946-49). Years after the camps were phased out, seven notebooks written in secrecy and buried under a tree have surfaced, revealing the truth about their suffering and their survival. The women’s journals, and Toska’s film, bring to light some history the Greek government continues to manipulate and repress.