Vasia Markides
Vasia Markides lives and works in Maine, but hails from Cyprus. Originally a painter, Vasia completed her first documentary, HIDDEN IN THE SAND (2008), a chronicle of her mother’s Cypriot hometown of Famagusta, a city under Turkish occupation. Vasia’s pull to Famagusta is due to the fate of her family home, now off limits within the six square kilometer district of Varosha, abandoned and fenced off for the past five decades. HIDDEN IN THE SAND screened in venues and festivals across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Germany, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, France and Portugal. But that wasn’t the end of Vasia’s obsession with Famagusta. After launching the Famagusta Ecocity Project, an effort to revive her mother’s hometown as an environmental ecocity, her team’s work gained international attention (including a couple of million hits on their BBC article and a TedX talk). Vasia has also been directing a documentary about the effort – WAKING FAMAGUSTA, which aims to enter the festival circuit in 2023. In addition to her film, art and activism, Vasia very much enjoys writing, and has published a piece in The Nation magazine on the pandemic called Silver Linings on the River. While continuing post-production work on the Famagusta film, Vasia currently teaches high school filmmaking and photography, bringing her years of creative experience to the next generation of visual artists.