Some days the studio fills with colour. Mystic Van Rouge and Katina Bella, the Rainbow Mermaids, came to the Mastermind Productions studio in Kolonos to record episode 124 of their vidcast. Their guest was Sotiris Tsafoulias. The episode went up on YouTube on 4 November and passed 89,000 views within its first days.
For us it was a great joy and an honour. Two hosts adored by their audience, a director we admire, and a conversation of almost two hours that flowed as if the cameras weren't there.
Rainbow Mermaids
Mystic Van Rouge and Katina Bella come from Thessaloniki and have been friends for years. Rainbow Mermaids started in 2024 and is now in its fourth season, with 124 episodes and more than 47,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Their recipe is simple and hard at the same time. Humour, lots of colour and questions that go straight to the person. Their guests don't come to say the obvious. They talk about their lives, about what hurt them and what made them. The show also gives space and a voice to the LGBTQ+ community, with warmth and without preaching.
Who is Sotiris Tsafoulias
He was born in Piraeus in 1975. He studied shipping and for years ran his own shipping company, which he built from scratch. He came to cinema self-taught, with two films he financed himself. Common Denominator (2014) won festival awards and Eteros Ego (2016) won the Audience Award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Eteros Ego became a series on COSMOTE TV and ran for three seasons. 17 Klostes and Rififi followed. In theatre he has staged, among others, Enigma Variations with Giannis Bezos and Pygmalion Dadakaridis, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In the episode he says he has just sold his company and now has only art left.
What we heard
Almost two hours of conversation, with humour and honesty. Here are a few moments we kept.
The beginning
The Piraeus of his childhood, and a kid who wrote little stories long before he knew what a script was.
From theatre to cinema
A rehearsal with the school theatre group gave him his first role. Years passed before he turned to cinema, and he rewrote the script of Eteros Ego more than a hundred times.
How he chooses his stories
“I don't choose my subjects, they choose me.” He is drawn to what doesn't change with the years: love, acceptance, recognition. His measure is emotion. “When I well up at the monitor, I believe whoever watches it later will well up too.”
Art and machines
On artificial intelligence he said something that stayed with us. “Whatever cannot fall in love and cannot die cannot produce art.”
To young Sotiris
“Don't take yourself too seriously, or life itself. In the end everything will be fine. And if it isn't fine, it isn't the end.”
What we did
The episode was recorded at the Mastermind Productions studio, our podcast and vidcast studio in Kolonos. Vaggelis Tsagarakis was director of photography. We set up the cameras for three people sitting in armchairs and talking for almost two hours, with close-ups for each of them and a wide shot that holds all three. The light stayed warm, with the wood, the orange backdrop and the purple shelves of the set, so that it matches the colour of Rainbow Mermaids without drowning it.
Sound was recorded by Sokratis Seirlis. In a conversation full of laughter, interruptions and three voices talking over each other, the sound has to stay clean from start to finish.
A warm thank you to Mystic, Katina and Sotiris Tsafoulias for their trust and for a beautiful day in the studio.
You can find the full episode on the Rainbow Mermaids YouTube channel and on Spotify.
