Cyprus Inherited: Making Memory in the Work of Maria Anastassiou, Anna Kannava, Katerina Vassiliou

Katerina Vasiliou’s memoir Komm, komm (Mikrotext, 2026) is informed by social and political history and explores the fragmented experience of growing up with more than one country of origin, while reflecting on the meaning of homeland and the ways culture and heritage continue to shape us from afar. Told with affectionate humour, it considers how the trauma of prejudice and conflict is inherited by subsequent generations.

Notes: Remembered and Found (2024) is a short film about Maria Anastassiou’s family through the eyes and traces of four generations of Cypriot women, in which she revisits diaries and cassettes recounting war and displacement and asks how history and inherited official and family narratives are mediated across generations.

In Ten Years After … Ten Years Older (1986), a deeply personal documentary,Anna Kannava returns to her home city of Limassol in Cyprus, to reconnect with her beloved grandmother, ten years after migrating to Australia as a 15-year-old in 1974. Described as a balsam preparation applied to heal wounds, her voice and imagery takes us into the innards of migration, longing, love and loss.

Katerina Vasiliou is a British-Cypriot writer and teacher who grew up in London and is now based in Hamburg. Her work explores themes of identity and growing up between British and Cypriot cultures. She received the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2010 and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Prize in 2015. Her book Komm, komm, published in German by Mikrotext Verlag in July 2026, had been previously shortlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize.

Maria Anastassiou is a Cypriot artist and filmmaker whose work explores the form and application of filmmaking structures and processes as entry points into place, histories, community and collaboration. Her films have been shown at amongst others; Whitney Museum NYC, Benaki Museum, Athens, NiMAC Cyprus, BFI London Film Festival, Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Berwick Film and Media Festival UK, Open City Documentary Festival London. She is currently a resident at A House for Artists in London and a PhD candidate in Film by Practice with the University of Exeter and London Film School.

Anna Kannava (1959–2011) was a Cypriot-Australian filmmaker, writer and actor whose work explored migration, memory, displacement and belonging. Born in Limassol, Cyprus, she migrated with her family to Melbourne in 1974 following the invasion, aged fifteen. Despite being hampered for most of her adult life by a debilitating condition, Kannava completed a number of highly personal and poetic films, including the acclaimed documentaries Ten Years After … Ten Years Older (1986) and The Butler (1997). She also directed plays and wrote two novels. Kannava died in Melbourne in 2011, aged 51.