'The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes' - Courtesy of Argonauts/SXSW London In the remote mountain village at the center of Thanasis Neofotistos’ moody debut feature, the superstitious locals have a chant: “Nay Evil, yay Good!” It’s a ritual meant to ward off strangers — and in The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes the stranger in question is a boy whose unusually blue eyes mark him as a threat to everything the village holds sacred.
The genre-bending Greek film, which can also be read as a queer coming-of-age story, world premieres in the Screen Festival of SXSW London 2026 on Thursday, June 4. Starring Giorgos Karydis as Petros — a boy forced by his strict grandmother and the village mayor to hide behind a mask — the film is written by Neofotistos and Grigoris Skarakis, shot by Djordje Arambasic, and edited by Panagiotis Angelopoulos. Gersh is handling U.S. sales. A cinematic allegory for exclusion, the longing to be seen and the desire for love and freedom, The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes uses a symbolic, myth-grounded visual language to tell a story that is rooted in a specific place but unmistakably universal. Neofotistos spoke with THR about the personal experiences behind the film, its 12-year journey to the screen and why the evil eye is more than just a tourist trinket.
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What can you share about the inspiration for the film and its journey?
I’ve been working on this project for almost 12 years. It started back in 2015 as an idea, and it all began because I grew up in one of those places [you see in the film] in Epirus on the border to Albania. The mountains in Greece are totally different from what everybody knows about the islands. So I grew up there. My grandmother was from a very small village with 10 families or something like that. She’s dead now, unfortunately, but she used to be very superstitious. She believed very much in those things like the evil eye, which we call ‘kako mati.’
Thanasis Neofotistos’ The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes. Courtesy of Argonauts Can you tell me more about the “evil eye” and its significance?
It’s now a very touristic thing in Greece, but the mythology comes from before the time of globalization and before people blended with other cultures, when Greek and Eastern societies were mostly dark-eyed and dark-skinned. Back then, someone with blue eyes was immediately a stranger or a foreigner. He wasn’t seen as belonging to them, but seen as a threat, someone you should be afraid of. They believed that a stranger with blue eyes, which are always beautiful, can give bad energy to others if you look at them. This energy can even cause a jinx, curses or even death. My grandmother used to believe that very much, and she used to tell me. “Please don’t bring me a blue-eyed wife.” But I’m a gay guy.
While watching The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes, you sense the underlying theme of queer identity…
Yes, it is these two stories that I’m telling — about superstitions and what it means to be different, and how random it is to what makes someone different in every society. I’m coming from a very conservative family that didn’t accept me until my late 30s. Actually, they accepted me through my stories. First, they watched my films, and then we talked about my homosexuality.
Petros is my alter ego. But he’s not different because he’s gay; he’s different because he has blue eyes. I wanted to speak about how random is to be gay in my family and in society. I was born this way, just as Petros was born with blue color in his eyes.
I wrote the film with my co-writer, who is now my husband. We got married last year, and my family was there, which was very fortunate. We wanted people to understand this randomness and how being gay is not a choice.
Petros’ mother feels like my mother in real life. In the film, she tries to hide his eyes, like my mother tried to hide my sexuality from the family. When I was young, they were telling me to play basketball. I wanted to go do ballet.
Thanasis Neofotistos Courtesy of SXSW London There is some violence in The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes, but I feel it’s mostly felt through words and behavior. How did you approach the use of violence? I never use violence to provoke. Whatever happens in the film happens because Petros needs to grow up, so I feel it’s organic to the story. All the violence, or all the trauma and anxieties, are there because I’m a traumatized person, as a gay person.
I got bullied in high school, that’s a very traumatic event. I feel this trauma when it comes to a teenager —Petros is 15 years old — can be a horror story for him, and my cinematic language helps with this.
Please tell me a bit more about your cinematic language. It’s impressionistic storytelling with a POV, point of view. It’s all from Petros’ perspective. I never use anything in the film that Petros doesn’t hear or doesn’t feel or doesn’t see. So whatever happens around Petros, it’s about how Petros feels at the end. I welcome the audience to come and feel Petros’ struggle in his coming of age, his growing up. That’s why there are also some magical realism elements in the film. It’s not fantasy, but it’s also not reality. It’s Petros’ point of view.
You mentioned violence. That might be Petros’ perspective and not reality. I’ve been doing psychotherapy. If you start storytelling your trauma many years after being a teenager, maybe you start feeling like people were dying around you. I felt like I was suffocating, and people were trying to take out my eyes or take away my sexuality, trying to bind me. That’s why this violence happens, because it’s Petros’ perspective.
The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes Courtesy of Argonauts You don’t detail when the film is set, but it feels like it could take place any time — and also anywhere…
I’m a millennial. Because I grew up in the ’90s, I wanted this feel. It’s a timeless film story, but together with Dafni Kalogianni, my production designer, and my costume designer, Christina Lardikou, we were inspired by the ’90s. You see that in the colors and [objects] — there is an old camera, an old TV somewhere in the film, there is a microphone, so there is a feeling to Petros’ bedroom of the ’90s.
How did you cast your young lead actor?
Giorgos was like Petros in the beginning. He was very shy, very introverted. But after one month of shooting, he became Petros, and you can feel it at the end of the film that both have changed. They had a very similar arc. And actually, it was also Petros’ voice that had changed, and that was very, very moving.
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