In the Cyclades, everything is dictated by the winds: which beach to go to, where to eat, whether you can take a boat trip, whether or not you can reach the island at all. Even the Olympic Air propeller planes that service islands with smaller airports cannot land once the summer meltemi winds gather pace. There is no airport on Kimolos, a volcanic speck in the western Cyclades: to get there, you must take the nine-hour slow boat from Athens, risk getting seasick on a five-hour catamaran ride, or fly to Milos then take a taxi to Pollonia on the other side of the island for the 20-minute ferry crossing to the port of Psathi. “You can’t predict the weather, so you can’t plan too far ahead,” says Fotis Marinakis, who works on the Osia Methodia, the dinky ferry that ploughs the strait between Milos and Kimolos. “Schedules eat away at our lives. It’s good to surrender to the joy of spontaneity.” Sturdily built and deeply tanned, with a disarming directness and a steady gaze, Marinakis is not concerned with ferry schedules. He is preoccupied with when and where the next screening of his pop-up summer cinema will take place. Cine Kalisperitis — christened after the local name for the evening star — has gradually gained momentum since Marinakis decided to screen a handful of movies on the wall of the schoolyard in 2014. “The following summer, I was a little more ambitious. I thought: why not show a movie on the beach? So I borrowed a tractor, we dug some holes in the sand on Psathi beach and set up a makeshift screen.”

Sturdily built and deeply tanned, with a disarming directness and a steady gaze, Marinakis is not concerned with ferry schedules. He is preoccupied with when and where the next screening of his pop-up summer cinema will take place. Cine Kalisperitis — christened after the local name for the evening star — has gradually gained momentum since Marinakis decided to screen a handful of movies on the wall of the schoolyard in 2014. “The following summer, I was a little more ambitious. I thought: why not show a movie on the beach? So I borrowed a tractor, we dug some holes in the sand on Psathi beach and set up a makeshift screen.”

Since then, Marinakis and a tiny team of local volunteers who call themselves Kimolistes have raised money to buy two moveable screens and staged open-air screenings in increasingly dramatic locations all over Kimolos and the surrounding archipelago: on the wave-worn rocks at Rema, an inlet of colourful boathouses carved into the coastline; on the jagged white cliffs of Yero Nikola sta Ypsila; on Kofto, a peninsula surrounded by the submerged remains of an ancient necropolis (which also makes for incredible snorkelling); and on the fluorescent blue bays of Polyegos, the largest uninhabited island in the Aegean. If the winds are persistently higher than three on the Beaufort scale, screenings take place inside the crumbling medieval Kastro, the heart of the island’s only village, Chorio, where Marinakis has fashioned seats from wooden pallets covered with rag rugs. Most locations are only accessible by boat or on foot, with transport to the trailhead provided by the local bus. The screenings are always free and open to everyone.

“We mainly show art-house movies, and we always try to match the film to the setting. A lot of thought goes into the programming, even if we have to make last-minute changes because of the weather,” says Marinakis. We had been exchanging text messages for a few weeks so that I could time my visit to Kimolos for one of the screenings that take place once or twice a week in July and August, with the occasional bonus event in June and September. The film I had travelled for 24 hours to see was Mikra Agglia (“Little England”), a period melodrama by the venerable Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris.

In truth, I had come for the setting. As dusk fell in a lilac haze, I joined a wonderstruck crowd strolling through sun-bleached fields to Amoni, a spit of sand shaped like an anvil on the southwestern tip of Kimolos. Hundreds of solar-powered lanterns were strung along the path, leading to a large screen at the water’s edge. In the front rows, teenage couples cuddled on inflatable sunbeds. The rest of the audience were seated in rows of plastic chairs or cross-legged in the sand. As the sun melted into the horizon, the credits began to roll. The lights of Milos flickered on across the inky strait and the sky filled with constellations.

“When you go to Cine Kalisperitis, you don’t just watch a movie. You watch the stars, the scenery, the island itself. Every corner of Kimolos is like a movie set,” the island’s mayor, Konstantinos Ventouris, tells me over coffee the following morning. Ventouris had left his hardware store for an hour to meet me at Kali Kardia, an institution in Chorio since 1920. Better known as Bohoris (the owner’s nickname), it has chequerboard marble floors, flowerpots trimmed with lace, and is a lively source of local gossip, sustenance, and entertainment year-round. Ventouris is unassuming in denim shorts and a polo shirt, with an easy warmth and crinkly eyes. This is his third term as mayor of Kimolos, whose official population of just over 800 dwindles to about 350 residents in winter.

“My mother went to work as a maid in Athens when she was 9 years old, and never finished school,” says Ventouris. “When I was 12, I moved to Athens to attend high school. I wanted to find a profession that would allow me to return to the island, so I trained as an electrician.” Finding ways to support the permanent residents and encourage younger people to live on the island year-round is one of the mayor’s biggest priorities. Apart from the rare minerals and chalky clay (including bentonite, kaolin, zeolite and pozzolan) that have been mined on Kimolos since antiquity, this raw and rugged island has scant resources.

Nevertheless, the economy is relatively self-sufficient: several farm shops sell exceptional yoghurt, xino and manoura cheeses, handpicked capers, rock samphire, and tiny, briny olives. (Two desalination plants, which are mostly solar powered, provide a sustainable water supply.) The butchers are stocked with local goat and lamb, and five fishermen supply the family-run tavernas. The landladies of simple rooms to let make pies, preserves, and eggs from their own chickens for their guests’ breakfast. “Our agriculture supports our tourism and vice versa,” says Ventouris, “But we don’t produce enough for huge numbers of visitors.”

Although Kimolos has never been dependent on tourism, the soaring popularity of its larger, brasher neighbour, Milos, is causing ripples of apprehension. “We don’t want to become an island for mass tourism,” says the mayor, emphatically. “It’s the small, locally owned businesses that support our economy, not big hotels that import seasonal workers and goods. If you build more rooms, more people will come. We don’t want to keep up with demand, we want to set our own parameters.” For now, life on Kimolos proceeds at a reassuringly gentle pace. There is still a real sense of intimacy in the meandering alleys of Chorio, where you have to duck past bed linen and underpants drying in the sun, or sidestep old men on battered mopeds rattling past, crates brim-full of melons or tools strapped to the back. Little smiling suns and rhyming couplets are painted on the cobblestones. Everyone has time to stop for a chat. As I sit with the mayor, a rolling cast of local characters come and go: three vice mayors, a builder, and Kyr Nikos the grizzled baker, who brings me warm orange and sesame cookies and a paper bag of bite-size heirloom tomatoes from his vegetable patch. “You’ve never tasted tomatoes like these,” he says with a wink, shuffling off to bake more ladenia, the local flatbread smeared with sun-dried tomato paste and caramelised onions that makes the perfect beach snack. Babis Sardis, a fisherman with a grin as broad as his shoulders, sidles up. “I have a kilo of striped red mullet. Any takers?”

Like most locals, Sardis has a side hustle in tourism to boost his income; he and his wife Electra have converted a house they inherited from his parents into a small guesthouse, Monachofolitses. There are no big resort hotels on Kimolos, only a few family-run guesthouses, some private villas and Airbnbs, and the locals would very much like to keep it that way. “What we can ‘sell’ is the untouched natural beauty of Kimolos,” says Sardis. “There is very little human intervention on the landscape, and what we have always done is in harmony with nature — for survival, not for profit.” The most unusual places to stay are the converted boathouses burrowed out of the porous tuff along the island’s shoreline. Known on Kimolos as magazia, meaning “shops”, these structures were built as garages for wooden fishing boats during the winter. In the summer, the fishermen’s families convert them into seaside shacks where they can barbecue their catch or take a siesta after a salty morning diving off the rocks. Since construction on the coastline is forbidden by Greek law, many boathouses do not have title deeds, although they may have been in the same family for generations. Occasionally, a second-storey bedroom is built above the boathouse, and these are increasingly being converted into holiday rentals. You can’t get any closer to the water than these humble cave houses with wooden doors that swing open to the sea.

To reach Thavma, a sensitively restored boathouse poised on the rocks at Karra, I have to park at the bottom of a steep cement track, cross a tiny cove where a fisherman is untangling his nets, scale some steps roughly hewn into the rock face, and follow the blue arrows painted onto the footpath. The reward: two deckchairs on a terrace surrounded by every shade of Aegean blue. For three days, I barely change out of my swimsuit — tiptoeing over smooth rocks for early morning swims, reading under the pergola, showering outdoors, breathing to the steady pulse of the waves. Whooping teenagers jackknife off the islets offshore, yachts drift across the horizon, the light shifts and dances on the distant contours of Polyegos, inhabited only by goats and monk seals. Marinakis had let me in on a little secret. In a few days, weather permitting, he was going to screen Casablanca on the sandy beach of Pano Mersini on Polyegos. I thought of all the invisible effort that would go into conjuring up a cinema on a castaway island for one night only: transporting hundreds of chairs, setting up the screen, hanging all the lanterns, and then dismantling it all again the next day, leaving no trace.  Behind the scenes, Marinakis dedicates untold, unpaid hours to pulling off this act of pure romance: emailing distributors, securing sponsors, acquiring permits from the authorities, organising transport. He has changed jobs several times so that he can take leave in the summer to focus on Cine Kalisperitis. Marinakis does it all with gusto and grace. Just don’t ask him to send the programme in advance. As he says: “The element of surprise is part of the romance.”