There was always within him the deep scar left by the passage through those post-war children's camps - glorious royal places of submission and manipulation, sanctified stations only in name: "Apostolos Paulos", "Agios Charalambos", "Kali Panagia", "Agios Dimitrios", Athens, Veria, Thessaloniki, 1949-1955.

Having long traversed most of his inevitable paths, Yiannis Archontis arrives alone one June afternoon on a deserted beach of the Aegean. It was not so much the need for a final reckoning, as the persistent "search for lost time" and the signs left within him by an era hermetically sealed, like the enclosed and resplendent institutions where he lived six of his early childhood years.

There, as an illuminated ship passes through the night, from the "murky depths" of his memory, where he had pushed it away for more than fifty years, unexpectedly emerges the specter of the child he once was, to finally tell his whole old story.

As long as the sharp "night of the Reaper" lasts, facing the darkened sea, the mature man and the uprooted boy become entangled in two strange and almost parallel monologues. The synchrony of immature memory with belated judgment divides the face of Yiannis in two, making trauma and healing coexist at the same time.

The Child speaks incessantly, with all the ignorance and innocence of his age, although sometimes with unexpected accuracy; day by day, he retrieves the recorded years of his life in those children's camps; he crosses once again with sorrow the arid desert, searching for the lost source of true love. Meanwhile, the sparse "interventions" of the mature man seem to be addressed only to himself, as what he seeks, behind his obsessions, rejections, and fears, is nothing but his own true self.