“A truly, madly, deeply moving love story, inventively told and powerfully evocative of time and place.’”
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“Nous Deux Encore” (translated as “The Two of Us Still” or “Together Again”) is a universal love story- one that crosses cultures, transcends time, and defies age. The idea of true love is something we all understand. We’re either searching for it, holding onto it, or remembering it after it’s gone.
This film is narrated by Maxie Leoussis on the eve of her 80th birthday, 22 years after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Yiannis. In poetic, unscripted words she paints a compelling portrait of one couple’s passion for life and for each other, captured visually through actual photographs from the extensive collection of images shot by Yiannis over the length of their courtship and marriage.
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This short film was very well-received on the film festival circuit winning over 11 awards.
Nous Deux Encore (The Two of Us, Still)
Documentary | 17 minutes
DIRECTOR
Heather Harlow
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Tessa Papas
Story + Voice OVer
Maxie Leoussis
Editor
Jacob Pander
Composer
Michael Hoppé
“One day I asked myself – ‘If you could have known that all this was only for twelve years and that
you would suffer what you have suffered, would you have done it or not?’ “The answer was ‘yes.’
It was twelve years so rich that I will never regret having gone through it.”
“It’s a universal love story,” says producer and director Heather Harlow of Nous Deux Encore, a 17-minute short film that “crosses every culture. It’s timeless and ageless. And everyone can relate to love. It’s what we all look for, and Maxie found it.”
The film is narrated by Maxie Leoussis on the eve of her 80th birthday, 22 years after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Yiannis. In spare, unscripted words she paints a compelling portrait of one couple’s passion for life and for each other, captured visually through actual photographs from the extensive collection of images shot by Yiannis over the length
of their courtship and marriage.
The story began in September 1971. French television journalist Maxie Barellis had finished editing a documentary special on drug trafficking in America and decided to fly to her favorite island in Greece, Mytileni, for a brief vacation. On her return the still single 42-year old stopped over in Athens. At a friend’s party that evening, Maxie was just about to leave when Yiannis Leoussis stepped through the door, and froze at the sight of her. “It was like a brick had dropped on his head,” she recounts in the film. “I’m thinking: I am living in a novel where one meets someone and he is completely smitten! This is incredible. Love at first sight really happens in life!”
He drove her home that night, and every night thereafter. At the end of two weeks they made love and by the following August they married. Maxie’s colleagues were amazed. The dedicated career woman, in television since 1955, was leaving it all behind to join a Greek full time in Greece. She had been one of the most successful producers and on-air reporters in France, traveling extensively to conduct in-depth interviews with major news makers and celebrities. She gave it up because, “I knew that Yiannis loved me. I knew that I loved him. But it was very tough to leave my career, because I had a real career. And not only that, I loved what I was doing. But I did not hesitate. I did it!”
For the next 12 years, the Leoussis lived in the passion of the moment – spending their weekdays in Athens and weekends sailing off Ermioni, a small fishing village in the Peloponnese where they owned a house. Despite their differences, (“Of course we argued! Many times! I used to say you could not find two more different people…”) theirs was the love of true soul mates. But, as if he knew it couldn’t last, Yiannis constantly recorded their life together. He took literally hundreds of snapshots with the Rolleicord twin-lens reflex camera he had received at the age of 12. “Yannis loved photography. He was always taking photos,” Maxie recalls. “His camera had a self-timer, so he would set it to take pictures of us wherever we happened to be.”
Then, in February 1984, tragedy struck. Yiannis was rushed to a clinic with appendicitis. Inexplicably, the doctors chose not to operate and after three days he had developed peritonitis. Despite three operations he lapsed into a coma. For three weeks Maxie lived at the hospital always hoping but, “Somehow, I knew he wasn’t going to make it.” The last day he was alive, she recalls, he made an enormous effort to raise his head and to gaze at her deeply. It was their last moment together. With Yiannis gone, Maxie was paralyzed with grief. “It was so tough. I just wanted to die. I would never commit suicide, but I wanted to die. I wanted just a miracle and I would be dead.
But I was not dead, and I didn’t want to stay in Athens like this, so I went back to work in TV.” By April, she was back in Paris. For the next year, she worked on a major corporate film, just to stay busy. And at the end of it, she made the decision to leave television and filmmaking permanently. “Here it was, 12 years later and he’s dead and I’m again doing what I was doing when I met him,” she explains.” I said, “I cannot do it, because the most important thing of my life is the 12 years I spent with Yiannis. It was as though I was saying he never existed.”
Maxie returned to Athens, which continues to be home as she travels the world, visiting friends and assisting renowned multimedia artist, Andre Heller and famed opera singer, Jessye Norman. Even as a new widow, Maxie says there was never a moment of doubt in her mind that “this was my first and last marriage.” She has never even dated since. “I did not have to make any decision. Every time someone would ask, the ‘no’ would come out of my mouth. I could not. I live all the time with Yiannis, and you cannot go on a date bringing your husband with you!” Yet, she says, she would never advise other widows to do the same. “It’s tough and life is difficult alone. And, to be honest, I’ve met men who are very interesting. But I could not. I could not be unfaithful,” she says.
THE MAKING OF THE FILM
Brought onto the project by Tessa Papas, producer/director Heather Harlow met Maxie in early 2008. Despite an almost four-decade age difference, they hit it off immediately. “I just fell in love with Maxie the second I met her. She has such a vibrant energy about her that I knew I had a lot to learn,” says Heather. “She has an incredible insight into love and life and happiness. It’s as though she knows something that we don’t know. She’s figured it out.” A year spent in France, as well as a several-week visit to Greece, allowed Heather to match Maxie’s words with a visual tableau of both Yiannis’ photographs and new footage shot by Jacob Pander, who recently won two prizes for his debut feature film, Selfless, at the BendFilm Festival. “So I understood where she lived and what they experienced, because I’ve been there and seen the beauty of Greece. The story really appealed to me on many levels.”
Tessa Papas felt compelled to provide the funding and to find the right director because of “the familiarity of being in Greece in the 70’s, of living the same sort of extemporaneous life, and of being such good friends with the Leoussis. Greece was such a special place at that time”. The two couples frequently sailed together, dined together, drank together and on occasion, smashed plates together. “This little film resonates with me at so many levels; I’ve always admired the courage with which Maxie somehow got through Yianni’s death. And then some years later I experienced the same profound loss. ” In 2000 Bill, Tessa’s husband of 30 years,
was killed in a small plane accident in Alaska. Today Maxie and Tessa find ways of seeing each other several times a year. Their friendship is enormously important to both. Maxie originally planned to turn the photographs and her memories into a book, but it never seemed to progress. Then a few years ago, a friend in television suggested a documentary accompanied by Maxie’s own voice-over. The first time Maxie saw the preliminary CD of what has become Nous Deux Encore the impact of the images projected on a screen was far greater than she expected. “I cried like a baby for hours,” she says. “For me to be able to do this movie
with these photos, it’s something so good, so tender so loving …… It’s really a big achievement
for me. When you look at the film, you don’t think of Yiannis as a dead man, do you?”