With Until the Ship Sails, in which he also stars, Alexis Damianos, a distinguished figure in the Greek theater, became the most listened-to voice in the new wave of independent filmmakers-a movement that was almost immediately forced underground by the coup of 1967. (Damianos re-emerged with a vengeance with Evdokia.) Until the Ship Sails is a triptych representing three stages in the journey of a mountain villager who is forced by wretched conditions to migrate to the city and ultimately emigrate to Australia. Based on stories by three well-known Greek writers, the film depicts a matrix of moral, sexual, and financial struggles that force an individual to flee his native land. "In each (episode) we meet men and women locked into awful, dead-end struggles. Precocious for its time, the film in each of its stages brings home the status of women as property" (Georgia Brown, Village Voice).