Michalis in the middle

What kind of person is Michalis Kalopaidis? Well, take for instance the fact that he cooks – not professionally, just as a hobby. Nothing strange about that, lots of people do it. But what, I wonder, is his specialty? What do friends know him for? His curries, his pasta, his sourdough bread, what?

“I do my own demi-glace,” he replies. “I usually do it on my birthday, because it takes, like, 10 hours!”

A demi-glace isn’t a dish per se, it’s a brown sauce used as a base for other sauces. Beef bones are boiled into a broth with assorted vegetables; you start off with 12 litres of water, and end up with 30-40 small cubes. Michalis makes it once, in a marathon session – then will use it as a base in steaks, risottos and so forth for the rest of the year. Talk about being organised and playing the long game.

One may call him an organiser, and it’s clearly accurate – but it may be even more accurate to call him a natural host, a man who enjoys inviting others into his world and curating their experience.

He used to host a rock-music show on Radio Elios at the age of 16 (he’s now 45), a tender age for a radio presenter. He hosts friends, of course, when he cooks for them. He hosts audiences every week, in his capacity as president of the Larnaca Cinema Society. He hosts me too, because we meet in his hometown of Larnaca: he sends a location pin with our meeting place (Nick’s Coffee Bike, in the city centre) – then immediately follows up with a second pin, showing me a good place to find free street parking nearby. Like I said, curating the experience.

One could call Michael a communicator – and perhaps a motivator too, though that might be a little too blunt. “I don’t know if you want to use the word ‘motivator’. But ‘enabler’, maybe.”

Communication is a big part of his role at Zedem Media, the animation company he founded in 2008 – a Larnaca-based studio that’s remarkable in (at least) two ways.

The first is that, despite being a small local operation (there’s a total of six creatives, four of them Cypriot), they work with massive clients from all over the world – the most surprising being perhaps TED of TED Talks fame, a pointedly global company that could have its pick of any animation studio in the world.

“They saw our work,” explains Michalis, making it sound surprisingly random. “We won a competition with an educational video that explains how robots make decisions, and they saw our work.” Zedem have animated about three dozen videos for TED, most of them amassing millions of views – leading, in turn, to a commission from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a short film on ancient Greek artefacts that’s “now part of the permanent collection of the museum”.

The second reason why Zedem are unusual has to do with the top man himself. “I’m not an animator,” admits Michalis. “I didn’t even study to be a film director, in the traditional sense.”

He has a Master’s in Cultural Studies – but his main education was a four-year diploma (he graduated in three and a half) in Arts, Entertainment and Media Management at Columbia College Chicago, an inspirational course divided more or less equally into filmmaking and business management. That half-and-half quality is akin to his role at Zedem, speaking both languages and acting (so to speak) as interpreter between creatives and clients.

The skill, he explains, is “to have a good understanding of what’s happening” in the world – socio-political issues, tech advances and so on – so he understands right away what the client wants to communicate, “and then communicate that to my creative team… And I’m like the person in the middle”.

Fair enough. If Michalis Kalopaidis were merely the head of a successful animation studio, though, he’d be only moderately interesting.

Zedem is indeed his livelihood, his only paid job – but much of the job entails motivating (sorry, enabling) others. “Because of the way I run the studio, and the projects that we have, I can talk to my team – they’re all senior people – for five minutes in the morning, they go on and do what they do, and I also have time to do other stuff.”

Part of that is the aforementioned Cinema Society, which he’s led since 2013 and turned into an unofficial cultural mission – a Petri dish for the kind of “audience development” he’d like to see happen generally. Another part is a podcast he’s been hosting since April (hosting again!) called Culture & Tonic. Another is The Parrot Lady, an award-winning short he directed some years ago. And the other, most crucial part – what he calls “a new chapter in my life” – is his recent foray into politics, leading the committee on cultural policy at Volt Cyprus, the progressive party founded in 2021.

“My motto in life,” proclaims Michalis, “is ‘How do we create a positive social impact through the arts and media?’…

“Even through my professional work, I always try to find projects that – they help us make a living, but at the same time they have a meaning. That’s why I prefer to work with non-profit organisations, educational organisations – in Cyprus, for example, it’s Birdlife, it’s the European Commission – and help them get their message and their stories out there.”

His politics are liberal and progressive – a belief “in the power of civic society” – which he puts down to the influence of the school in Chicago. But he also has the hard-nosed approach of a business-management graduate – especially when it comes to the cultural and creative industry (what he calls CCI) in Cyprus, the beleaguered artists forever begging for money and teetering on the brink of crisis.

“We need to find ways to empower this sector,” he says firmly, “so that CCI can further contribute to the GDP of our country. It’s an industry. It’s not just a creative ecosystem with artists who struggle to make ends meet.”

His vision is a happy symbiosis: artists make a positive social impact, then society supports them in return. The state has a similar role to the one he often plays himself, acting as the host of the party, the facilitator – but Michalis’ solution isn’t just to throw money at the ‘problem’, as politicians invariably do. It’s to acknowledge, on the one hand, that Cyprus is a small market, so “we shouldn’t only produce arts for the local audience” – but also, on the other hand, to develop a national strategy for expanding that audience.

“At the moment, people – a very large part of our population – have no interest in arts and culture, right?”

I nod dumbly.

“Why is that? Because, quite simply, they’ve never had the opportunity to come into contact with these things.”

There’s a need to “create good habits,” he says. How will a Cypriot know about Cypriot cinema if it’s not on TV? How will they know about local music if it’s not being played on the radio? Volt, he vows, will endeavour to change that, taking its cue from other EU countries. “The concept that ‘art is a public good’ doesn’t mean everything should be free. But you should try and make it as accessible as possible.”

This is where the Larnaca Cinema Society comes in, an experiment in curated experience that’s been very successful (it undoubtedly helped that tickets were abolished, and screenings have been free, since five years ago). Their goal isn’t just to show movies, he says, “not just to entertain… How do we develop an audience for European cinema in Cyprus? That’s always our goal”.

Michalis and Co. host spirited discussions after each screening, often inviting local NGOs to discuss whatever topic the film deals with. They “try to create experiences for the audience”: screenings on the beach, or in public squares. Their audience has grown and become quite diverse, encompassing people with no previous knowledge of arthouse cinema – a hopeful indication that his idealistic vision could work, even in our (mostly) money-minded, bourgeois society.

Still, there’s a catch. Michalis Kalopaidis has indeed managed to create an audience for art in Cyprus – but it helped having someone like Michalis Kalopaidis leading the charge.

He’s very personable, one might say debonair-looking: trimly stubbled, with a fine mane of hair and a ready smile. His conversation is (no pun intended) animated. He radiates good energy, and energy in general. He gives a little talk before each movie – but not to talk about the movie, just to welcome everyone and make them feel excited to be there. Discussion at the end is “very casual and unpretentious”, with fun little touches like a ‘catchbox mic’ that gets tossed from one speaker to another.

Above all, Michalis is a doer – unlike, say, most of the civil servants who’d be tasked with ‘audience development’ if Volt ever came to power.

Even at 16 – when he was, he admits, just an average Larnaca teen with a very conservative worldview – he walked through the doors of Radio Elios and demanded a radio show. (That, too, became a cultural mission: the owners wanted him to play pop, but the young man insisted it was “really important to showcase rock music”.) Later, when he came back to Cyprus – he’d founded Zedem but didn’t have many clients, so he had free time – he created a platform called Kypros TV, filming and editing about 20 profiles of local creatives and uploading them to a free website. The artists hadn’t asked for the profiles; they didn’t even know who Michalis was. “It was just a passion project.”

Wait, so he sat down and made 20 documentaries – for no money and, he insists, with no ulterior motive? Who does that?

“I dunno, I’m weird that way… I mean, I could sit at home and do nothing, or just go to football games and whatever, but” – he shrugs – “I’m restless, you know? I always want to feel that I’m doing things that make our society a little bit better.”

The restlessness takes its toll. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease in his early 30s, an autoimmune disorder made worse by stress – and he is, admits Michalis, “a very stressful person” behind the ready smile and good energy.

How does he relax? The cooking helps – and he’s also renovated an old house in the village of Vavatsinia where they’ll go on weekends with his wife Effie, “do gardening… I play backgammon with my 91-year-old neighbour. I really enjoy it”. Mostly, however, “I really get a kick out of what I do… Just organising, producing this thing” – whether the thing in question is an animation studio, a film society, or (now) a political platform.

Michalis is driven, no two ways about it. I cite some cynical – but largely true – objections. Culture in Cyprus is too state-controlled, making it sluggish and bureaucratic. Our national character is essentially passive, most people lacking the drive to create something new. Volt only got 2.9 per cent in last year’s EU elections. Even his audience in Larnaca only amounts to a couple of hundred people.

Maybe, maybe not – but he is, to put it mildly, unfazed, caught up in his new passion project. When he talks to people in our ‘cultural ecosystem’ (which he does all the time, networking being one of his obvious strengths), “everyone always talks about problems,” sighs Michalis Kalopaidis. “They never say what the solution should be, what we can do to fix things. But when you sit down, in a structured way… you see that the solutions are right there!” It may not happen now, but it’ll happen. As with his demi-glace, he’s playing the long game.