Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991-2016 9781474437059

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Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016

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To my mentor Yorgos, For his precious teachings and unshakeable love of cinema

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Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016 Philip E. Phillis

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Philip E. Phillis, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3703 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3705 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3706 6 (epub) The right of Philip E. Phillis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Greek Immigration Cinema

vi viii 1

1.

Looking Across (Greco-Albanian) Borders: Diasporic, Migrant and Supranational Filmmaking

35

2.

The Anxieties of Transnationalism: Reception of Immigration Films

56

3.

En Route to Fortress Europe: Migration and Exilic Life in Roadblocks

79

4.

Tragic Pathos and Border Syndrome: Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage

103

5.

Neither ‘Good’ nor ‘Bad’: Reinventing Albanian Identities in Eduart and Mirupafshim

125

6.

Others/Mirrors

145

7.

Our Own People? Repatriation, Citizenship, Belonging

172

8.

Migration Without a Face

197

9.

Documenting Crises: Raising Awareness through Documentary Film

224

Filmography Bibliography Index

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250 252 265

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Figures

1.1 Panayotis, the Albanian restaurant owner, enjoying the service of his Greek employee Yorgos, in Correction 1.2 Saimir standing, forced to choose between his loyalty to his Greek and Albanian families, in Agon 3.1 ‘Don’t talk now. Shut up!’ Entrapment and clandestinity manifest in the back of a truck in Roadblocks 3.2 Ahmet kisses a letter from home in Roadblocks 3.3 An ‘empathic close-up’ of a Kurdish mourner in Roadblocks 4.1 Elion appears entirely trapped in the claustrophobic enclosure of the bus in Hostage 4.2 The postures of clandestine migration: Elion appears hunched behind a bush in Hostage 4.3 Embodied protest: Elion displays the scars on his body, in a close-up in Hostage 6.1 Yorgos finally manages to ‘break into’ Ornela’s apartment in Correction 6.2 Stavros appearing out of place in his own home, in Plato’s Academy 6.3 Marenglen appearing out of place in Plato’s Academy 6.4 Alexander is forced to buy the boy from the traffickers in Eternity and a Day 6.5 Alexander displays his paternalistic stance in Eternity and a Day 6.6 Alex addresses the refugees from a position that displays his hierarchical placement in Man at Sea 6.7 The refugees cut themselves, performing embodied protest in Man at Sea 7.1 An uncomfortable coexistence between indigenous and Ethnic Greeks in From the Snow 7.2 A monumental shot of the queer protagonists of From the Edge of the City 7.3 Sasha is confronted by his strict father before being beaten, while the mother watches complaisantly in From the Edge of the City

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47 52 82 93 97 113 116 121 150 154 156 159 160 165 168 178 184 186

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FIGURES

7.4 Dany confronts the symbolic father in Xenia 8.1 A group of refugees tightly framed within immobile train carriages in The Suspended Step of the Stork 8.2 A Kurdish refugee slits his wrist in protest over accusations of betrayal in The Suspended Step of the Stork 8.3 Brechtian distantiation: the Kurdish refugee hanging in the distance in The Suspended Step of the Stork 8.4 An objective establishing shot renders the masses of refugees in essentialist terms in Ephemeral Town 8.5 Wretched ‘boat people’ departing again to open sea in Ephemeral Town 9.1 A close-up on a crying boy amplifies the drama and tragedy of the scene in 4.1 Miles 9.2 A close-up of Captain Papadopoulos in 4.1 Miles. At the back we can discern an icon of St Nicholas 9.3 The gross inequalities between tourists and refugees displayed in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good 9.4 A local man slaps an African refugee and threatens to deport him in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good 9.5 Golden Dawn members and followers make public displays of power like a Nazi militia in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair 9.6 Haris Mexas proudly shows off his prized copy of Mein Kampf in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair

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vii 192 204 208 209 214 215 230 232 235 237 241 242

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Acknowledgements

This monograph would never have been completed without the precious help provided by my family and especially my parents, Yannis and Nili. This book is a result of their material and emotional support throughout many years of studying film and media in higher education. I wish to extend my gratitude to the following scholars for their advice and support: Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Ian Goode, Lydia Papadimitriou, David-Martin Jones, Ipek A. Celik, Wendy Everett, Tonia Kazakopoulou, Maria Kokkinou, Igor Krstić, Rebecca Carr, Maria Chalkou, Albrecht Zimmermann, Alkistis Pitsikali, Christine Geraghty and George Souvlis. I am grateful to the filmmakers who took the time to discuss their work with me: Robert Budina, Yorgos Korras, Christos Voupouras, Stavros Ioannou, Kyriakos Katzourakis, Constantine Giannaris, Kimon Tsakiris and Sotiris Goritsas. I owe special thanks to Yorgos Korras for providing me with archival material and for DVD copies which would be otherwise unobtainable. Thank you to my friends at home and away from home. I wish also to deeply thank the editorial team at Edinburgh University Press for their precious help throughout the writing and processing of the book. Special thanks to my sister Anastasia for helping with technical matters. Last but surely not least, I must thank my loving partner, Fanny, who understands my love for cinema like very few. Her support and advice kept me going when I needed it most. Philip E. Phillis

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I NT RO DUCTION

Greek Immigration Cinema

In a chapter submission to Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg’s seminal volume European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, Isabel Santaolalla writes that ‘[T]he increased visibility of migrant groups and individuals is currently perhaps the most striking feature common to Spanish, Italian and Greek cinemas.’1 This monograph marks a first attempt to comprehensively map and investigate migrant2 representation in Greek cinema from 1991 to 2016 and to convey what indeed makes migration a striking feature in contemporary Greek film production. In her remark, Santaollala includes the southern European countries that transformed from senders to hosts of migrants, the axis of ‘Fortress Europe’.3 Southern Europe has been struggling to manage the large influx of migrants and refugees which began around 1989, following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the reunification of Germany and the signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985.4 The agreement facilitated greater movement within the EU and simultaneously mandated fortification against ‘invasions’ of people from poorer and socially unstable countries, who generated great fears for public security, health and local economies, particularly in northern states.5 By 1994, roughly four million people had migrated across the porous borders of Europe, an estimate that does not include those fleeing genocide in the former Yugoslavia.6 For Stuart Hall, the new international order of migration after 1989 marks ‘the era of globalisation and migration’,7 indicating the inextricable links between migration and globalisation. ‘Fortress Europe’ is telling of a fortress mentality, as exemplified by exclusionary citizenship policies and nationalistic public sentiments which underlie mass discrimination against newcomers. They are, in addition, met with a bureaucratic nightmare in countries like Greece, which are entirely lacking in appropriate infrastructure and integration policies. Rather than implementing European multiculturalism, the Greek state has routinely resorted to strict exclusionary measures while mass media outlets conjure migrants and refugees as ‘invaders’ and an overall threat to the moral fibre of the Greek nation.8 Public anxieties

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on shifting demographics started emerging as well in a country that saw ‘its own’ people feeling estranged at the dawn of a ‘new world order’. With this term, Vangelis Calotychos refers to the Greek state’s fierce modernisation agenda, which dictated that it ‘repositions and reforms itself in a new international environment’, manifest in the thousands of migrants at the Greek threshold.9 For Calotychos, fulfilling the mandates of European modernity and multiculturalism ‘would demonstrate whether Greek society could reform itself and accommodate the changing populace or whether it would simply dig in its heels’.10 The new world order in Greek cinema can be pinpointed to 1991 with Theo Angelopoulos’s The Suspended Step of the Stork/To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou, which mourns the tragic displacement of entire populations and their stagnant lives in Greek refugee camps. Angelopoulos’s film was released one year after Xavier Koller’s Journey of Hope, a film that exemplifies stories of ‘illegal’ border-crossing and journeying from underprivileged sending nations to Europe. Both films signal a fin de siècle melancholy marked by the tragedy of displacement and a new order of cinematic representation which happens across borders and focuses on the new protagonists of European cinema. Prolific filmmakers increasingly turned to the cinematic rendering of migrants’ stories, forming a visceral fascination with the borders and the very definition of Europe at a historical juncture. Films like Angelopoulos’s mirror the shifting sociopolitical landscapes of Europe and contours of mobility in post-Schengen Europe, serving as sites for the renegotiation and reconstitution of European identity. They are thus ‘central to the working through of this complex process’.11 In Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Yosefa Loshitzky argues that from the 1990s onward, cinema has greatly served to renegotiate European identity as shaped by the experience of diaspora and exile, particularly from the point of view of indigenous filmmakers. The latter appeared to be preoccupied with a wider identity crisis following the end of the Cold War, which generated ever-growing anxieties as to where Europe begins and ends.12 More than ever, European filmmakers urge viewers to rediscover a lost humanity, exemplified in Angelopoulos’s wretched refugees, and to provide an adequate response to the ‘strangers at our door’,13 as seen with the freezing refugees banging at the glass door of a spa facility at the end of Journey of Hope. There is no doubting that migration is one of Europe’s most entrenched questions and simultaneously one of the most visible themes in European cinema since 1989.14 Films like the ones mentioned above may be preoccupied with a question that implicitly involves Europe and Europeans, but they also emerge from a place that challenges European identity as they question deeply held values and beliefs. They put national

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frameworks of enquiry to the test and appropriate a particular version of transnational, accented and post-national modes of filmmaking, embodying cross-border mobility on a textual and extra-textual level. Moreover, they express solidarity with their migrant protagonists, who are often conjured as victims of an intolerant society. They thus challenge the core values that keep a nation and national cinema tightly knit while also transgressing many borders – cultural, ideological, filmic, political – ushering in a new order of filmmaking and posing challenges to scholars, who are invited to look beyond established categories of filmic enquiry. Rather than glossing over a long list of films and their individual features, I will closely examine the preoccupation of Greek filmmakers with migration in order to convey the transformation of Greek cinema from national to transnational and to show how Greek films have moved from a more insular model to one that mirrors Greece’s European agenda.15 I argue that once migration became a prominent theme and transnational and European coproduction was standardised, Greek cinema adopted a European status, without the essentialisms that have traditionally inspired research into European cinema, namely discourses of high art and the de facto national designation of distinct European cinemas. Above all, this book proposes a comprehensive approach to migrant representation in film and offers thorough scrutiny of popular representation strategies employed by Greek filmmakers in their attempts to redeem migrants from xenophobic discourse. The new cinema of Greece displays the journeys of migrants and voices their plight while echoing major anxieties on the multicultural composition of the host society. Filmmakers raise a mirror to their troubled audiences and encourage a humane response to the ‘Other’. Although Greek cinema has historically featured stories of Greek émigrés,16 I will not be looking into this field, focusing instead on films dealing with the displacement of foreign populations in Greece. A large corpus of films produced between 1991 and 2016 lays out the terrain of a cinema devoted largely to migrant representation and Greece’s sociopolitical present after 1989. The proposed case studies are also entirely different from the auteur films of New Greek Cinema and popular genres of so-called ‘Old Greek Cinema’. This is an entirely new and unexplored domain of Greek film production which demands scholarly attention through current and diverse frameworks.

From Sender to Host The new world order was ushered in with Greece’s European Union membership in 1981 and culminated with its Eurozone membership. The major challenge for the country and its crippled infrastructure has been

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the management of migrant populations. Indeed, following the sudden collapse of Albania’s communist regime in 1991, over 100,000 Albanians migrated to Greece, becoming Greece’s biggest migrant population beside populations from Eastern Europe and Asia. At the same time, a significant drop in the Greek population validated resounding calls for national cohesion.17 For a country accustomed to emigration, without any policies or state mechanisms in place,18 foreign immigration was an unprecedented turn of events. Southern European countries suffer from poor statistical records and demographic accounts in the region are often contested. It is estimated, however, that from the mid to late 1980s, migration to southern Europe saw a three million increase in the region and, by 1999, one in ten persons in Greece was a foreign migrant, most often of Albanian descent.19 Stathis Fakiolas points out that 300,000 undocumented Albanians lived in Greece by 1996, contesting the numbers given by the Ministry of Public Order, which expose its questionable intention to give an impression of security to a public terrified of ‘illegal’ immigrants.20 In the 2010s, Greece served as a stop toward the north, but 1990s Greece was attractive for its employment prospects, which fuelled a migrant imagination informed by extreme conditions in the sending nations (push factors) and expectations lying ahead (pull factors). With its seasonal and tertiary enterprises, and in desperate need of cheap flexible labour, Greece was appealing to economic migrants like Albanians and Poles, who took on several jobs since their families relied heavily on their remittances.21 Cheap labour was appealing also to prospective employers since it ‘escapes the regulated nature of unionised, formal sector employment and is available only when needed by employers’.22 Uninsured, unskilled and illegal labour formed the basis of Greece’s labour force in the 1990s, especially since the more business-minded Greek entrepreneur of the 1990s loathed the idea of manual work, which was then automatically assigned to migrants. Migrant labour contributed to the expansion in construction work throughout the 1990s, which also prepared the ground for the 2004 Olympic Games. This was achieved chiefly thanks to Albanians, who became directly linked with precarious construction work, to the extent that stereotypes circulated associating construction sites with Albanian ethnicity.23 The sudden transformation of Greece from sender to host of migrants was seen as an interruption in the course of efforts to domesticate a latent modernity and assert a national coming to being in the Balkans and Europe. For a country with a history of transitions and with national identity being the locus of an entrenched struggle, migration into Greece was ‘both a challenge and a shock to the political and ideological conditioning of the

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population’.24 The Greek state has sought to achieve national assertion from the early twentieth century through its nationalist agenda and irredentism, which meant reclaiming Christian Orthodox, Greek-speaking diasporas and minorities in the neighbouring regions.25 These aspirations underscore the determination of the fragmented Greek state to become a nation state, adding thus to diplomatic clashes with Balkan neighbours. This has contributed further to the region’s image as one of political instability and strife. Yet, the Greek state has historically struggled to rid itself of its Balkan affiliations,26 which became all the more impossible with the inescapable presence of the Albanian ‘Other’. The political climate at the time was characterised by Yorgos Papandreou’s claim that ‘Greece is no longer a Balkan country in Europe, but a European country in the Balkans’,27 affirming negative stereotypes on Balkan culture as a force that can set European modernity in backward motion.28 There was a great fear of Albanians since, coming from the nearest communist country, they would allegedly ‘import’ the kind of barbarism29 Greeks associated with Balkan communist regimes, which was not befitting to an emergent European nation state. Papandreou’s statement indicates how Greeks would inevitably have to renegotiate national identity and cultural belonging (Greekness) in Europe and the Balkans, as though to mirror the precarious geopolitical positioning of Greece. It is arguably not coincidental that the bulk of the films discussed in this book have dealt with the encounter of a Greek protagonist with an Albanian migrant. After all, from 1991 until the early 2000s, Albanians were present in staggering numbers and were the most heavily discriminated migrant group. Most importantly, they reminded Greeks of their shared Balkan affiliations. Migrants generally remind southern European countries of ‘the humiliation and pain of being [ . . . ] the unbearable “dirty30 foreigner”’,31 which, again, was not appropriate for an aspiring European nation state preparing to host the Olympic Games and become a major player in the terrain of globalisation and neoliberal capitalism. Following Benedict Anderson’s assertion that nations are inherently sovereign and limited ‘imagined communities’,32 a tightly knit nation is indeed imagined as homogeneous and strongly fortified but simultaneously liable to tear at the seams, as it is a fragile structure. Once its homogeneity and strength are disturbed by the presence of an ‘Other’, national identity and belonging are in crisis. The notion of ‘forgetting’ or ‘getting its history wrong’ according to Ernest Renan’s famous speech, What is a Nation? (1882), is essential to shaping a uniform nation. It is ‘a process of brutality’ and ‘a crucial factor in the creation of a nation’.33 This is particularly true for Ernest Gellner, who asserts that ‘nationalism comes before

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nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around’.34 Eventually, nationalist sentiments in Greece, rather than dissolving, became normalised and widespread thanks to mainstream media outlets capitalising on the growing electorate and the sensational rhetoric of the fascist party Golden Dawn since the 2008 financial crisis. Endemic political corruption and populism35 paired with public resentment toward the European elite impeded the process of Europeanisation and made the stalemate even more impactful on migrants stuck in a country unwilling to manage them. Instead, the Greek state has repeatedly resorted to temporary and inefficient solutions implemented on racist premises. These include ‘sweep operations’, the so-called ‘epiheirisi skoupa’, which consistently underlies the modus operandi of Greek police forces. With the word ‘broom’ included in the term, this initiative refers to ‘clean-up’ operations very often carried out by elite police factions, which keep undocumented migrants and other social pariahs out of public visibility by collecting and indefinitely arresting them to provide a facsimile of public order and security.36 The term ‘skoupa’ (broom) in this case ‘evokes the moral and gender ideals associated with keeping a clean home’, a metaphor often extended to mean the nation.37 The fortress attitude of the Greek state was eloquently summarised in the title of Parliamentary Act 1975/91: ‘Police control of border crossings, entry, residence, employment and deportation of aliens and identification procedure for refugees’.38 This Act clearly demarcates the borders between indigenous Greeks and migrants and employs methods of expulsion and surveillance. Greece’s policy, or lack thereof, reflects the ethnocentric conditioning of the modern Greek nation. Indeed, ethnicity and culture, rather than civic rights, are the defining agents of identity and belonging which make it possible to distinguish Greeks from foreigners. According to Triandafyllidou and Veikou, The reluctance of the Greek government to accept immigration as a long-term feature of Modern Greek society was at first partly related to the novelty and unexpected character of the phenomenon. However, the continuing lack of a comprehensive policy framework, even after ten years, and the political and public debate on the issue suggest that there is a relationship between this reluctance and the ethnocultural definitions of Greek nationality and citizenship.39

The mismanagement and exclusion of migrant populations alongside growing resentment among the Greek populace secured Greece a place in the echelons of Fortress Europe. The region is often described as the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe,40 as it is a gateway to the continent for ‘invasions’ from the global south, an issue that resonates today with the

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strong presence of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, which is responsible for pushbacks, a term which indicates blocking migrants from entering and forcing them back. Migrant-directed discrimination in Greece during the 1990s and early 2000s involved to a large extent Albanians, for reasons that pertain to shared historical prejudice and nationalist clashes.41 From 2010 onwards, the ‘new Albanians’ are refugee populations from the Middle East, Africa and sub-Indian continent, while first and second-generation Albanians have become integrated or, in some cases, returned to Albania. Islamophobia has also developed as Muslim populations, deemed a threat to Christian Orthodoxy, have become a major target. In 2012, a ten-kilometre wire fence was built along the Evros River on the northern border, making entry to Greece much harder than before.42 This was the first of many obstacles erected on the Balkan route with Macedonia and Hungary closing their borders in 2015. Another was the opening of the Idomeni refugee ‘welcome centre’43 at the Macedonian border, where refugees waited indefinitely to be processed. In 2016, the EU–Turkey Joint Action Plan furthered European efforts to hinder ongoing migrant flows. It commanded increased border patrols by Turkish authorities to prevent asylum seekers from entering the Greek islands, in exchange for financial assistance in the management of Syrian refugees.44 With major entry points sealed, refugees resort to smugglers who guide them through the treacherous routes of the Aegean Sea. In 2015, the Greek state saw a surge in arrivals from Turkish shores to the island of Lesbos, which has transformed into a major location of international media attention amidst an escalating refugee ‘crisis’. The island is also known for the Moria detention immigration centre, a severely overcrowded facility where reports of mental health deterioration, riots and even child suicide45 are regularly cited by Greek and international media, painting the camp as a locus of explosive violence. This is not uncommon as the mainstream media tend to associate refugees and migrants with violence, either as perpetrators or receivers, ignoring the wider horizon of reference behind migrant-related violence. This is partly linked to the definition of a refugee set out by the United Nations in 1951,46 which demands that individuals display tangible proof of persecution, fear and imminent danger – most often injuries which call for immediate humanitarian care in the name of ‘humanity’.47 Miriam Ticktin insists that the designation and protection of people as refugees focuses too strongly on bodily integrity, making thus a universal politics of immigration strangely apolitical. ‘A politics of immigration based on this type of care and compassion gives papers to an HIV+ Malian woman, an Algerian child with

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cancer, and a gay Moroccan man gang-raped by Moroccan policemen and closes the doors to most others, making these strangely desirable conditions for immigrants.’48 The refugees making their way to Greece are conjured either as ‘invaders’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or as ‘anonymous numbers perishing in dangerous crossings’,49 whose suffering and eventual death at sea happens in a distant temporality, cut off from a Greek society increasingly frightened by the encroaching ‘waves’. Public hostility towards refugees has been growing steadily, alongside distrust towards the EU, two issues which the far right has successfully exploited. The Moria detention immigration centre was built in 2013 on a former military base. During the presidency of the radical left-wing party Syriza and of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, from 2015, the centre has hosted thousands of refugees in unhygienic conditions, exposed to the elements, malnourished and brutalised by riot police forces who are often summoned to quell riots that break out as a result of growing frustration among refugees. Syriza rose to power on the premise that it would eradicate austerity and clash with the country’s creditors, but capitulated to EU pressures after being faced with the prospect of a ‘Grexit’, following weeks of futile negotiations on necessary restructuring of the Greek debt. Tsipras returned from Brussels empy-handed and, rather than eradicate austerity, surrendered major public assets and implemented fierce austerity measures as part of a memorandum of understanding which crushed the morale of Greeks. The government’s capitulation was seen as a betrayal, and proved a great blow to the international left. Friction within Syriza led to internal schisms and the departure of its most radical members, who formed several smaller parties. The left in Greece was defeated and, with that, Syriza compromised its radical agenda. In coalition with the populist right-wing party ANEL and its openly anti-immigrant leader Panos Kammenos, the government passed all the harsh measures the creditors demanded, and the party refashioned itself accordingly by appointing more moderate cabinet members, thus eliminating its radical core. During the presidency of Syriza, reports of human rights violations in Moria and elsewhere were often cited by Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières. Such reports though were ignored by the government, while representatives of Syriza even attacked international press and media outlets reporting from Lesbos.50 Syriza’s failure to manage the influx of refugees and their accommodation affected thousands and was accompanied by the unchecked reign of corrupt NGOs which exploited the state of affairs on Lesbos and neighbouring islands. Syriza’s mismanagement of the crisis allowed attacks by fascists and local militias against volunteers

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alongside the spread of conspiracy theories. Moreover, Syriza complied with EU policies which went against any notion of human rights and the Geneva Convention, for instance the accords which allowed mass deportations of refugees and migrants from Greece to Turkey.51 Syriza’s capitulation laid the foundations for the victory of the right-wing party New Democracy in 2019. In 2019, the newly elected conservative right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced a series of draconian measures that strip undocumented migrants and asylum seekers of access to free health care, which ‘the Greek tax payer should not be obliged to pay’ according to Minister of Health, Vasilis Kikilias.52 The new measures additionally grant greater liberties to Frontex, with Mitsotakis himself accusing newcomers of abusing the asylum-seeker status, which according to him should be the exclusive right of Syrians fleeing war.53 His deputy, Adonis Georgiadis, notorious for his anti-Semitic remarks and hackneyed nationalism, has also declared that ‘the image of boats full of people looks like an invasion’, legitimising extreme xenophobia.54 The overall climate has made pushbacks all the more permissible. This kind of attitude, however, is nothing new in a country that has continually failed to meet expectations on migrant management with respect to human rights,55 leading ultimately to the meteoric rise of Golden Dawn in mainstream politics, in tandem with the emergence of the extreme right in Europe (more on the rise and fall of GD in Chapter Nine). The Greek government’s attitude echoes the aggression behind the general consensus on migration in twenty-first-century Europe and the failure of the EU to implement burden-sharing third country resettlement, an essential mandate of international refugee policy.56

The Cinema of the Host Nation: Hegemonic, Accented, Hybrid The shifting and intense state of affairs captured the attention of Greek filmmakers, who have engaged with the here and now in ways that eschew the sensationalism of the mass media, reaffirming thus the power of cinema to serve as a mirror of current societal issues. Their films can be assessed according to a vast array of terms and comprehensive categories which have steadily featured in contemporary Anglophone film studies. These derive from textual (the content of films) and extra-textual (creative context) components. In her recent monograph Immigration Cinema in the New Europe, Isolina Ballesteros utilises the term ‘immigration cinema’ as an all-encompassing category ‘within broader preexisting categories such as “social cinema,”

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“world cinema,” and “third cinema” and in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturaltion, border crossing, transnationalism and translation’.57 The author explicates further that Immigration cinema, whose label refers to its subject matter and the filmmakers’ (as well as its audiences’) ideological orientation, documents or fictionalizes the social phenomenon of immigration and the unfortunate but unavoidable ramifications of racism and xenophobia, and gives voice to the social group of immigrants and their allies on the margins, the ‘undesirables’ of society that constitute the broader category of Otherness.58

In terms of the potential to address the misrepresentation of migrants by the mass media, indigenous filmmakers act as ambassadors for disenfranchised migrants silenced by oppressive regimes of power. One must therefore take into account and be aware of the fact that Greek immigration cinema is produced ‘by symbolic representatives of the host/ receiving societies, rather than by the “strangers” in their midst whose work constitutes part of a “minority discourse,” traditionally based on ethnic autobiography and autobiographical fiction’.59 As Santaolalla aptly remarks, minority discourse in southern European cinema is still ‘in its infancy’, despite a longer period of migration to southern Europe60. The migrant experience in Greece, the encounter with and transformation of Greece, are conjured by Greek filmmakers who cater to a white indigenous audience61 intrigued by the ‘Other’, but not equipped to understand or approach him or her.62 Indigenous filmmakers have de facto greater access to the means of production and representation than aspiring migrant filmmakers63 in European host societies. Minority discourse can be traced back to 1980s Britain and the Black Film and Video movement, which saw a growing number of films made by black African and Caribbean filmmakers who radicalised the political and cultural agenda of the time.64 Judith Williamson refers to the movement as ‘oppositional filmmaking’,65 while Sarita Malik utilises the more pertinent ‘cinema of duty’66 to highlight the movement’s urgency as it owned the potential to revolutionise the ‘official race relations narrative’.67 The term highlights the direct links of radical filmmaking practices to politics as well as the dutiful task of filmmakers. In a similar fashion, symbolic representatives of the receiving nation produce a cinema that challenges a respective narrative on migration, calling for immediate unpacking of its conventions and representational strategies. This broad understanding of Black Film and Video serves as an initial departure point for films dealing with the social urgency of migration in prospective host societies.

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Regardless of good intentions though, it must be noted that Greek immigration cinema is produced from a hegemonic position of enunciation since relevant power structures empower indigenous filmmakers rather than the migrants represented on film. What’s more, the filmmakers’ dominant status makes it easier to accommodate market demands while diasporic and exilic filmmakers are very often forced to adopt alternative modes of production and dissemination in order to reach a wide enough audience. In terms of representation dynamics, minority discourse provides a look from within, but hegemonic or dominant cinema privileges the place of ‘Us’ looking at ‘Them’. The hierarchical division between an indigenous filmmaker, as a purveyor of migrants’ stories, and the foreign migrant per se, makes respective binaries inescapable, primarily because they preexist and settle the encounter in the host nation. From a hegemonic viewpoint, filmmakers tend to reproduce binaries – us/them, indigenous/foreign, national/displaced – allegorising the encounter of the Greek nation with a ‘stranger’ by assuming, in the majority of case studies, a Greek protagonist’s point of view. Prospective audiences as well are not primarily migrants and minority groups but first-world audiences. All this is problematic because ‘[T]here are very few neutral binary oppositions. One pole of the binary [ . . . ], is usually the dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of operations. There is always a relation of power between the poles of a binary opposition’.68 This is not to imply that filmmakers entirely fail to do justice to the misrepresentation of migrants and refugees by the mainstream media, but to remind the reader and viewer of the limited access of minorities to self-representation and the capacity of indigenous filmmakers to speak on their behalf, thus detracting from the greater purpose of a ‘cinema of duty’, which is to empower the minority member. Thus, non-western audiences tend to observe and consume rather than produce and disseminate their own narratives. It is worth asking then to what extent indigenous filmmakers can rectify the injustices that ‘strangers’ endure in Greece and, if they cannot, what they propose instead. For these reasons I resort to the term ‘cinema of the host nation’, which incorporates the hegemonic dynamic between guest and host and makes it possible to initiate a critical dialogue on the capacity of cinema to radically reassert the terms of representation. The bulk of research into the cinema of the host nation is predominantly on the work of filmmakers from former colonial nations like France69 and England.70 In this respect, filmmakers have consistently dealt with postcolonialism and the ‘return of the repressed’ in the European metropolis, with ‘white guilt’ or the duty of a ‘white moral obligation’71 because of the history of colonialism.72 Major national European cinemas have also seen

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a proliferation of films by diasporic and postcolonial filmmakers whose work and status reflects the shifting power dynamics in former colonial states.73 Greece however is a southern European country of emigration and thus exilic and diasporic modes of filmmaking have not been widely appropriated by filmmakers with a migrant background, who are not easily integrated. The question thus is how to assess the work of representatives of the host nation when they utilise the aesthetics and themes conceptualised as the exclusive ownership of accented filmmakers. This means that allowances need to be made in the way we classify immigration cinema as a whole, since filmmakers of the host nation tend to appropriate the themes, visual codes and to a lesser extent the modes of production assigned to accented filmmakers. The term, famously coined by Hamid Naficy, is meant to designate the ‘accent’ of filmmakers who are thought to import into the content and creative background of their films, the vicissitudes of exilic life and a personal experience of displacement which acts as an interruption in the host nation’s cinematic production. ‘Accent’ here encapsulates more than a film’s spoken languages or the ethnic diversity of a film’s cast. For Naficy, accented films differ largely from the mainstream and especially the ‘unaccented’ product of Hollywood cinema, typically thought to emerge from a production line and with the capacity to colonise smaller national cinemas (cultural imperialism): ‘[I]f the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that exilic and diasporic subjects make are accented. [ . . . ] [T]he accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic characters as from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes’.74 By employing artisanal and collective modes of production and working in the interstices of established film industries, accented filmmakers are seen as lone artists who exist on a higher plane within smaller diasporic and exilic communities of outsiders who don’t obey the demands of industry. In other words, Naficy pits the auteur against a mainstream unaccented filmmaker, in a binary that automatically posits the auteur as a superior ‘great artist’. The major criticism with accented cinema − which can allow us to use the term more liberally– is that with its focus on autobiography and authorial signature, it reproduces the age-old discourse of art cinema (albeit not European) versus mainstream/popular genre cinema, undermining popular audiences and a large segment of cultural production. In addition, it overlooks possibilities of cross-pollination between accented and mainstream/hegemonic films. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg are, in addition, critical of a strictly linear approach and binary classification based on nationality and ethnicity, as these factors can have an essentialising effect.75 It is indeed a given by now that ethnicity, nationality

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and identity are not stable categories, but constantly transforming and in interaction with a wide array of other factors within the centre and margins of the host nation. Naficy’s conceptual category can therefore be used in order to comprehend the extent to which filmmakers of the host nation can empower migrants rather than determining the ‘quality’ of the proposed case studies according to their lack of an ‘accent’. In other words, the term should be used critically rather than prescriptively. Filmmakers of the host nation build their filmic universes on the kind of affective mise-en-scène which Naficy assigns exclusively to accented filmmakers. Greek immigration films reimagine the stories and journeys of migrants and convey their plight in ways that reflect a shared sensibility and aesthetic choices with accented filmmakers that include fragmented, multilingual, epistolary, self-reflexive, and critically juxtaposed narrative structure; amphibolic, doubled, crossed, and lost characters; subject matter and themes that involve journeying, historicity, identity, and displacement; dysphoric, euphoric, nostalgic, synesthetic, liminal, and politicized structures of feeling; interstitial and collective modes of production; and inscription of the biographical, social, and cinematic (dis)location of [some of] the filmmakers.76

In an age of global interconnectedness, with a proliferation of bordercrossings by first-world individuals, migration is no longer reduced exclusively to prospective migrants and linear trajectories from underprivileged sending nations to western Europe. Some of the filmmakers discussed throughout this book, like Theo Angelopoulos and Constantine Giannaris, are lauded auteurs with a steady presence at international film festivals. They receive funding from various national and international sources and their films are made and travel across national borders, an issue that brings to the fore the porosity of borders and fluid circulation of cultural capital in post-1989 Europe. Giannaris and Angelopoulos display stories of cross-border migration and thus work across and on actual geographical borders, employing migrants whose stories are often embedded in the films. Cross-border mobility in European cinema and filmmaking is not an exclusive feature of migrants or directors of immigration cinema for, in the age of globalisation, migrants are not only so-called ‘Third World’ people. Indeed, the film genre that defined post1989 European cinema, the road movie, reflects the pleasures of mobility in a new geopolitical environment.77 Its protagonists are drifters who find themselves on the thresholds of societies where airports and other spaces of transit materialise a new landscape of international exchange and movement of people, capital and information. Migration, as a term

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that designates movement across national borders, cultural exchange and journeying, lends itself very well to the cinematic medium as cinema and filmmaking are predicated on the notion of movement within time, considering especially that film is, literally, a series of twenty-four moving still images.78 The road movie, a genre that prefigures migration cinema, has gained a firm footing in Greek film production since 1990 and is an ideal vehicle for migrant journeys on screen. Sotiris Goritsas, director of From the Snow/Ap to Hioni (1993), the first Greek coproduction to display the trajectory from Albania to Athens from a migrant’s point of view, was also the first to embrace the Balkan road movie and the image of a Greek man as a wanderer and traveller79 in the new Europe, in Valkanizater (1997). In See You/Mirupafshim (Voupouras and Korras 1997), the Greek protagonist travels to post-communist Albania and is hosted by an Albanian family. The filmmakers spent time in Albania, learned the language and hosted Albanian migrants in Athens, gleaning their stories and cultural baggage. Their film is the outcome of several different border-crossings – geopolitical and cultural. These films feature a plethora of languages, a multicultural cast and depict the borders separating Balkan nations, conjuring the journeys of economic migrants, refugees and indigenous Greeks. In an age ‘of global production and capital flows and liberalised markets and information systems that exchange messages of their own accord, we are all “economic migrants” now’.80 What Stuart Hall means by this remark is that migration and mobility are no longer the exclusive ownership of Third World people who migrate to Europe. Movement and mobility have obtained exciting new facets and migration is not de facto a linear journey towards the Promised Land that is Europe (Eurocentrism). Filmmakers increasingly work across borders and in an international environment where subsidy, cast, crew and collaborators come from various directions within and outside Europe. Filmmakers themselves become migrants of a second order and distil their experiences, encounters and fluid identities in their films. The hegemonic status of filmmakers of the host nation does not automatically imply box office success. Their films appeal mostly to scholars, festival audiences and ‘cosmopolitan cinephiles’.81 They exist on the margins of domestic and international reception and receive accolades within the domestic and international festival circuits. The dearth of financial success among Greek immigration films is telling of their little appeal to popular audiences. Many of these films received limited distribution and are impossible to obtain in the commercial market at home and abroad, an issue that poses methodological constraints to researchers.82 The relationship between centre and margin,

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dominant and accented cinema, mainstream and art cinema is not as straightforward as Naficy envisions. Greek cinema is marginal on a global scale, making it susceptible to Hollywood’s global outreach but at the same time, at home, the cinema of the host nation is marginal in relation to domestic box office hits which share little with immigration cinema. In this respect, dominant cinema shares, besides similar themes and aesthetics, a similar fate in the market with accented films, whether a migrant individual or first-world filmmaker is at the helm. If accented cinema is a separate genre based on autobiography and biographical fiction and is part of minority discourse, the cinema of the host nation is arguably also a separate genre based on the aesthetic codes and themes of Naficy’s canon. Nonetheless, the cinema of the host nation cannot be easily pigeonholed, an issue reflected in the taxonomy I propose later on. According to Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler, today’s cinema of migration is more subject than genre; beside traditional narratives like those of illegality and crime, deracination and abscondence, the Italian cinema of migration takes on an increasingly wider spectrum of topics, layers, and spaces of the most diverse streams and realities of migratory life. Beside the melodrama, these narratives can be found in the road movie, the crime movie, and by now also in comedy.83

In order to unpack and comprehend the diversity of Greek immigration cinema, the aesthetic and thematic choices of filmmakers and deeper cultural and political implications of their films, a greater hybridity in our conceptual tools, mirroring also the hybridity of contemporary immigration films, would be necessary. Ascribing one specific conceptual category and the respective analytical tools would stop us from capturing the conceptual overlaps of this recent development in contemporary Greek film production.84 Greek immigration cinema is thus hegemonic and accented, interstitial and centred, artisanal and non-artisanal. It follows genre conventions of popular cinema and simultaneously adheres to conventions of art cinema and invites readers to cross conceptual categories, to challenge totalities and thus think across borders. Here I argue that Greek immigration cinema accommodates the mandates of both national and transnational cinema as though Greek film production, like the country itself, is undergoing a transition towards a different model in the age of migration and globalisation.

Greek Cinema: National, Transnational, Transitional Greek Cinema and Migration stems from rigorous and ongoing research into the transnational dimensions of European cinema and an overall acceptance by the scholarly community of post-national and supranational

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frames of reference. It is also the outcome of increasing publications in the field of world cinema and an impetus to apply the transnational to contemporary filmmaking, small national cinemas and established film histories. Postcolonial filmmaking as well can ‘challenge the western (neocolonial) construct of nation and national culture and, by extension, national cinema as stable and Eurocentric in its ideological norms as well as its narrative and aesthetic formations’.85 The national seems to have lost a lot of its validity and grip over cultural practice. To this I should add that coproduction became the modus operandi of filmmakers and increasingly so in Greece, where the Ministry of Culture and its subsidiary, the Greek Film Centre (GFC), is but one collaborator among various international contributors. Indeed, what traditionally would make the new cinema of Greece unreservedly Greek is seriously undermined by its subject matter and creative background. The films debated here do not adequately reflect the national designation of this book’s title. And yet, while Greek cinema has been morphing into an entirely new entity, the national and what makes it problematic are present, albeit in different form. The searing presence of nationalism in public discourse and the ‘narration’ of the Greek nation on film, whether this is friendly or hostile to newcomers, means that Greek immigration cinema is recognisably Greek. Greek cinema is arguably transitional, as though reflecting the numerous transitions and shocks Greece still endures. A national cinema is fashioned on the desire to summon the nation on film. In ideological terms, it adheres to the principles set out by Anderson, whose modernist conception of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ has ‘provided the theoretical starting point for most recent writing on national cinema’.86 ‘Forgetting’ and ‘getting our history wrong’ are also essential in designating the strict framework of the national, which caters to ‘films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off to other identities besides national identity’.87 It has traditionally required state subsidy and exhibition through national distribution networks primarily for local audiences. The study of Greek cinema has for long depended on this model. Major publications by Greek scholars, written in Greek, have left the question of the national untouched, with those by Yannis Soldatos standing out for his harsh criticisms of popular genre films.88 For Yannis Skopeteas,89 any departure from the national is a signal of the postmodern condition and implies a lack of ‘style’, a remark that brings to mind Susan Hayward’s anathema on coproduction: ‘[I]t is in this murky area of co-productions, especially when they are the predominant production practice, that the identity of a national cinema becomes confused.’90

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The so-called Old Greek Cinema is generally seen as a case study in the national. Its popular genre films were produced between 1955 and 1967 during the heyday of the Greek studio system, in Greek, and designed for internal consumption. With their strictly Greek themes and domestic distribution, these films were rather ethnocentric. Old Greek Cinema saw the rise to fame of local stars whose on-screen persona represented recognisable features of Greek culture and identity. Critics have dismissed Old Greek Cinema as a mere imitation of Hollywood genres and for ‘corrupting “authentic” Greekness’,91 affirming thus the centrality of Hollywood and the peripheral existence of smaller national cinemas. Many who pointed their disdain towards commercial cinema widely promoted the ‘quality Greek cinema’ of the late 1960s. The movement sought to capitalise on the critical success of New German Cinema, the Nouvelle Vague and Italian Neorealism and to ‘nationalize modernism’.92 Hence, national cinema is often, and arbitrarily, linked to art cinema. Contrary to what was thought of commercial cinema, New Greek Cinema was heralded as ‘quality’ cinema,93 with the capacity to voice a national identity in the present. The movement, however, lost momentum and died out fast, as respective films failed to appeal to popular audiences. The 1980s were characterised by an emergent counterculture and saw the increasing dominance of TV, which threatened ever-decreasing numbers of cinema audiences and venues.94 An EU membership in 1981 introduced the possibility of European coproduction and partnership with television channels,95 pushing Greek cinema into the realm of European cultural production and a supranational state of funding through the fourth multi-annual European Commission’s MEDIA programme and the Council of Europe’s production fund Eurimages. These institutions ‘utilize a pan-European perspective to tackle the issues of the contemporary film industry’, and thus ‘gain an elevated position in the debate on European cultural policy and cultural identity’.96 Greek films have featured in the LUX competition of the European parliament which promises wide distribution through the Europa Cinemas circuit. Plato’s Academy/Akadimia Platonos (Tsitos 2009) was a finalist and competed with Feo Aladag’s Die Fremde/When We Leave (2010), another European coproduction that tackles the uneven integration of Turkish migrants in Germany. These funding schemes and competitions are generally aimed at projects which mirror the multicultural composition of Europe and contribute to the linguistic and cultural diversity of European culture as well as the fortification of European cinema against Hollywood. Immigration cinema plays a major role in this equation and Greek films have been steadily gaining visibility within European circles of funding and

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exhibition, albeit in the festival circuit, leaving the issue of wider accessibility an open issue. By 1991, when The Suspended Step of the Stork was released, cinema attendance was at an all-time low and the artistic aspirations of New Greek Cinema had died out. Greek film production between 1986 and 1994 was dominated by the state and its clientilistic policies, a feature of Greek society as a whole. The GFC had full control over all initiatives and yet had no proper distribution and promotion mechanisms in place, an issue that has plagued Greek cinema for decades, making subtitling and international access very difficult. Filmmakers of Old Greek Cinema produced commercial flops and lost their popular appeal, while television had made the experience of cinema-going near obsolete.97 Immigration cinema emerged during a period marked by the domination of corporate TV channels as partners, which many saw as an influencing factor in the form of films which looked increasingly ‘televisual’ and lacking in quality. A major success of this collaboration was the smash hit Safe Sex (Reppas and Papathanasiou 1999), featuring popular TV actors, which grossed over one million tickets and set the terrain for the Greek blockbuster in the early 2000s.98 It addressed predominantly Greek audiences within state territory and set a precedent by becoming a popular television spinoff. Safe Sex spawned numerous other farcical sex comedies with titillating jokes and lewd humour. Films like Safe Sex utilised, for comedic purposes, popular stereotypes that targeted especially eastern European women, most often domestic cleaners and sex workers.99 On the other side of the spectrum, Angelopoulos’s film is a strong sign of the times. In line with the opening of borders, new immigrations after 1989, demographic shifts in Greece and initiation of European coproduction schemes, The Suspended Step of the Stork projects transnational identities, was produced by Greek and European collaborators and features a Greek cast beside two European art-house stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. His films in the 1990s secured financial support mainly from European private and state sources, and were a staple at international film festivals. Angelopoulos’s films from here on mark the transition from New to Contemporary Greek Cinema, from the national to the transnational. From then on, migration as a thematic, practical and formal concept gained salience in Greek films and filmmaking, signalling the end of the national as we knew it. The films of Old Greek Cinema may have been the result of a healthy industry and those of New Greek Cinema part of an artistic movement, but immigration cinema is neither a movement nor the result of a strong and functioning national industry. It is a tendency that stems

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from cultural, political, technological and ideological shifts in Greece and more so in Europe. Greek cinema from 1989 onwards is in touch with changes in European culture and demographics, and shifts in cultural practice and policy, as Greek film production opens up to the bigger picture that EU membership affords. In addition, the cinema of the host nation in Greece shares thematic and formal affinities with the majority of films produced across Europe. To think of any of these instances in Greek film history as representative of a strictly national cinema would require ‘forgetting’ various cultural interruptions, making cinema implicitly transnational. The transnational indeed finds a way in, as Dimitris Eleftheriotis has elucidated in his research on the links between Greek audiences and popular Indian melodramas during the 1950s and 1960s,100 and the cultural links between Greek comedies and portrayals of masculinity within non-western films, which outline the eastern affiliations of Greek culture rather than a direct link to Hollywood.101 Extensive research on Greek film culture has demonstrated the transnational aspirations of filmmakers like Michalis Cacoyannis, whose Zorba the Greek (1964) projected a ‘tourist-inspired national vision’ and was marketed to international spectators during plans to turn Greece into an international tourist destination.102 Films and their practitioners often transcend national boundaries; yet this tends to remain undocumented for the sake of a homogeneous national narrative. Both textual and extra-textual facets of the proposed films resist the strict logic of the national and its ‘limiting imagination’,103 making the transnational far more pertinent in our attempt to adequately assess cinema and designate one or more nationalities. Higson tackles the question of ownership and a film’s nationality in his discussion of British cinema: When a British director teams up with an American producer, a multinational cast and crew, and American capital, to adapt a novel about the contingency of identity by a Sri Lankan-born Canadian resident (The English Patient, 1996), can its identity be called anything other than transnational?104

When a Greek filmmaker like Angeliki Antoniou, who lives and works in Germany, makes a film about the struggle of a real-life Albanian migrant to contemplate his identity in post-communist Albania, filmed in Greece, Albania and Macedonia with Greek and German funding, spoken in Albanian, German, Greek and English, which nation should claim ownership? It is widely accepted by now that all cinema is transnational. From its inception, it has been transnational, a mobile medium that embodies movement and crosses borders in its production and dissemination.

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Transnationalism overall refers to cultural exchanges across borders and brings into relief the porosity of borders.105 This notion has been applied by scholars, who began to examine film not merely in terms of its artistic qualities but as a cultural commodity, in search of the border-crossings that happen in the production, distribution, exhibition and reception of films and the culture surrounding movies within and across national borders. Despite transnational aspirations, Greek films are seen primarily by Greeks in Greece, and international audiences cannot access them. Greek migration cinema is marginal not in dealing with marginal characters but because it is restricted to the domestic and international festival circuit, without a breakthrough in the market at home and abroad. The exception here remains Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are a staple of international arthouse exhibition and are cherished by cinephiles. Today, it is near impossible to find copies and subtitled screenings of Greek immigration films. Some of the films can be accessed exclusively in the archive of the national radio and television broadcaster ERT or at the GFC. The Internet is an increasingly valuable source, and a personal acquaintance with a filmmaker is often the only way to find a tangible copy of their films. In this respect, audiences may be unaware of the bulk of Greek film production and it is usually an elite of Greek scholars who will see films such as Roadblocks/Kleistoi Dromoi (Ioannou 2000), Ephemeral Town/Efimeri Poli (Zafiris 2000), See You and From the Snow, which are obtainable on DVD only from the directors themselves. Greek films are thus still restricted within national borders for reasons that pertain to difficulties in brokering deals with international distributors and in realising the translingual, which is crucial to transnational achievements. The translingual is achieved largely thanks to the preoccupation of scholars from different disciplines and geographical regions and the gradual dissemination of new ideas and frameworks in the study of Greek cinema, borrowed by Anglophone film studies. The Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema conference in 1991 at the British Film Institute in London was instrumental in kick-starting debates on identity and migration in European cinema after 1989, especially as it brought together filmmakers and scholars from film and cultural studies. The inaugural issue in 2010 of the Transnational Cinemas journal, now renamed Transnational Screens, emerged on an already existing corpus of publications by scholars who had embraced the transnational as a decisively more inclusive framework. Dimitris Eleftheriotis has further endorsed cosmopolitan authorship as a valid means to comprehend the internationalism and cosmopolitan identities of filmmakers like Jules Dassin.106 Dina Iordanova in turn proposes a supranational approach.107

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At the time this monograph was being composed, Steven Rawle published Transnational Cinema, which serves as an introduction for students and an essential guide to researchers embarking on this territory. Its publication is telling of the enduring currency of transnationalism in film discourse. Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, editors of Transnational Screens, ask ‘why the concept of transnational cinema, and why now?’108 Rawle remarks that one single national context cannot suffice to analyse particular films and, arguably, all of cinema.109 Higbee and Lim emphasise growing frustration among scholars working in the humanities ‘in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural and polycentric world’.110 By transcending the limits of the national, scholars are now in a position to comprehend how culture, identity and belonging are affected by the shifting dynamics of national boundaries, migration, globalisation and flow of cultural artefacts. Transnationalism, however, does not entirely replace the national but ‘supplements it’.111 The added prefix ‘denotes thinking about how cinema crosses and transcends national boundaries, just as individuals, capital, films and culture do’.112 Transnational film discourse allows us to capture the moment that boundaries are transgressed and that cultural difference manifests. This is to a large extent the aim when writing on migration – to give priority to hybridity and cultural difference, which emerge through transnational flows. Cultural difference is understood as ‘political, positional and essentially fluid’,113 resisting totalities. Within hegemonic discourse though, cultural difference dissolves and totalities often remain fixed and undisturbed. This occurs particularly in films that allegorise the encounter of an indigenous protagonist with a migrant who mirrors the former’s alienation and simultaneously cures it, reinforcing thus the centrality of first-world people and the marginality of migrants. Some are cautious of transnationalism as merely a rearticulation of internationalism, which erodes national specificity. As Higbee and Lim explain, ‘transnational’ tends to be taken as a given and a shorthand for an international or supranational mode of film production whose impact and reach lies beyond the bounds of the national. The danger here is that the national simply becomes displaced or negated in such analysis, as if it ceases to exist, when in fact the national continues to exert the force of its presence even within transnational film-making practices. Moreover, the term ‘transnational’ is, on occasion, used simply to indicate international co-production or collaboration between technical and artistic personnel from across the world, without any real consideration of what the aesthetic, political or economic implications of such transnational collaboration might mean – employing a difference that, we might say, makes no difference at all. It is precisely this proliferation of the term ‘transnational’ as a potentially empty, floating signifier that has led some scholars to question whether we can profitably use, or indeed need, the term at all.114

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In order thus to tackle migrant representation in Greek cinema, I resort to the authors’ concept of ‘critical transnationalism’, which calls for a critical, discursive stance towards the question of the transnational in film studies so that we are alert to the challenges and potentialities that greet each transnational trajectory: whether it takes place within a film’s narrative or production process, across film industries, or indeed in academia. In the study of films, a critical transnationalism does not ghettoize transnational filmmaking in interstitial and marginal spaces but rather interrogates how these filmmaking activities negotiate with the national on all levels – from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how it reconfigures the nation’s image of itself.115

So, why apply the transnational in Greek film analysis, and why now? The time was arguably ripe in 1991. Yet, film studies in Greece have only recently entered university curricula. Before, it was mostly in the hands of journalists like Vasilis Rafailidis and Yannis Bakoyanopoulos, critics of the vanguard of New Greek Cinema, who were revered by a small circle of cinephiles and disregarded by popular audiences as elitist. In a 2009 article, Lydia Papadimitriou notes that ‘[W]riting on Greek cinema is not a new endeavour, but until recently publications in this area have been predominantly journalistic, promotional and (auto-)biographical’.116 Her article was published just two weeks before the release of Dogtooth, by a young Greek filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos, whose low-budget film kick-started a new trend that Greek critics saw as the ‘springtime’ of Greek cinema amidst the ongoing financial crisis. Steve Rose of The Guardian baptised the new trend as ‘the Greek weird wave’ and suddenly the films of a new vanguard of young filmmakers, who sought to articulate a country in crisis through a hybrid aesthetic, gave Greek cinema international currency at festivals, venues and universities. This was a watershed in recent Greek film history. Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis take the film’s release as the starting point for their edited volume that sprang from the Greek Cinema, Texts, Histories, Identities conference in 2011 at John Moores University, Liverpool. Dogtooth’s distribution to film festivals and in select countries outside Greece, visibility at film festivals and in the international press, its nomination for an academy award for Foreign Language Film and availability in the United Kingdom as a subtitled DVD, make it a unique case study of a Greek film that reached audiences outside Greece.117 International conferences bring to the fore the transnationalism of film scholarship. Greek cinema was discussed across borders also with the Greek Film Cultures 2013 conference in London which saw published proceedings by Greek and foreign researchers.118 In the meantime, major publications in English have made Greek film studies, that is ‘the study of

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films produced and shown in Greece’,119 a valid area of research. These are Vrasidas Karalis’s A History of Greek Cinema published in 2012 and The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece After 1989 by Evangelos Calotychos, published in 2013, both professors of Modern Greek Studies respectively in Australia and New York. In addition to this, two journals devoted to the study of Greek film, media and culture were inaugurated in the aftermath of Dogtooth: Filmicon, the online Journal of Greek Film Studies,120 and the Journal of Greek Media and Culture. This kind of breakthrough has yet to be achieved for films preceding Dogtooth and its offspring. Greek immigration cinema transcends the nation’s borders in ways that break from mainstream Greek film production or the films of the ‘weird wave’. With the proliferation of immigration cinema across the world, the inescapable realities of contemporary migration and enduring strength of Fortress Europe, it is urgent that we look into the possibilities that cultural production affords in radically changing cultural perceptions. Migration is an essential signal of the transnational and immigration cinema a potent source of insight.

Greek Cinema and Immigration: Structure This monograph is not a thesis on a national cinema or a study of Greek cinema as national. Far from that, Greek Cinema and Migration is a focused study on a specific period in the contemporary history of Greece’s cinematic output and culture. The period starting from 1991 to the present brought a tumultuous transition for most European cinemas. Indeed, what has been going on in Greece since 1989 is not unique. To think of the shifts in Greek cinema as isolated would mean ignoring the bigger picture. Rather than one single argument, this book embarks on a wide but not exhaustive exploration of a number of themes and issues: Greek cinema and migrant representation, identity, Greek film production across borders, cultural exchanges in the making of Greek films, diasporic films in Greece by Albanian filmmakers, the relationship between film and mainstream media, stereotyping and intersectionality. Two particular issues recur throughout the book and are a major point of argumentation. One is the extent to which Greek cinema opens up to European platforms of communication and to themes involving Europe and its ‘Others’, while managing to overcome Eurocentric discourse which deems Europe an impenetrable Eldorado.121 The other, which is intertwined with Eurocentrism, is the permanence of victimhood in representation. To fully convey the transnationalism of Greek film production, I focus first on the creative background and reception of Greek migration cinema

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in Greece and abroad. I begin by examining diasporic film production in Greece. Here, I highlight what happens when Albanian filmmakers migrate to Greece, and launch a discussion on Albanian diasporic cinema and cultural exchanges beyond national frameworks of cultural production. In particular, I look at the life and work of Bujar Alimani,122 who migrated to Greece in 1992, received his mentorship beside director Yorgos Korras on the set of See You and went on to direct films in Greek and Albanian. His first feature-length film, Amnesty/Amnestia (2011), stands out as the first Greek–Albanian coproduction, filmed entirely in Albania. Alimani has been hailed by Greek critics as ‘one of our own’ and his films are treasured in both countries. Agon/Ksimeroma (Budina 2012), another Greek–Albanian coproduction, filmed almost entirely in Greece, deals on a textual level with exchanges between both countries and reflects further the shifting trajectories of movement from Greece to Albania, contesting the centrality of host nations. Agon and Amnesty highlight the location of ‘Other’ cinemas within Greece and Europe and, through their creative context, question established definitions of diasporic filmmaking. In Chapter Two, ‘The Anxieties of Transnationalism: Reception of Immigration Films’, I look into issues of production and reception of Greek migration films across national borders in order to discuss questions of cultural identity. The chapter opens with Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage/ Omiros (2005), its hostile reception at home and celebration by Albanians in Greece and Albania. Secondly, I address the obstacles that Angeliki Antoniou encountered in claiming the certificate of Greek nationality for Eduart and argue that both films showcase in their trajectories prevailing anxieties around the ownership of media and raise certain unsolvable questions around nationhood. Indeed, a careful look into the films’ creative context opens our eyes to a culturally rich and diverse cinema, proposing new and exciting routes of cultural production. The ultimate aim is to propose a more inclusive definition of a national cinema. Following a discussion of what happens at the Greek–Albanian border, Chapter Three provides insight into the formal elements of two films that feature migrant journeys, which Loshitzky aptly refers to as ‘journeys of hope’ to highlight the expectations of migrants trying to make it in Fortress Europe before hope turns into dystopia. In Chapter Three, ‘En Route to Fortress Europe: Migration and Exilic Life in Roadblocks’, I discuss issues of transnational mobility in Roadblocks. I am particularly interested in the notion of mobility impeded by borders that transform a journey of hope into nightmare, and how this is actualised through the director’s original blend of documentary, fiction, conventional and experimental filmmaking which makes it a unique case study in accented filmmaking. Adhering to

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Naficy’s canon, the film’s director displays chronotopes of exile and closed spaces that signify the claustrophobia of exile and clandestine migration. To comprehend the contours of the migrant journey in Roadblocks, we will also look at the push and pull factors of Kurdish migration, especially the concept of the migrant imagination and how it fuels the journey and features in the tragedy of hope turned dystopia. It is finally argued that, despite an original depiction of refugee lives in limbo, Roadblocks screens explosive violence and imminent tragedy, maintaining refugee lives in a perpetual state of crisis. Giannaris’s Hostage provides an original evocation of border-crossing through its reimagining of the 1999 hijacking of an intercity bus by a clandestine Albanian migrant who endured police brutality in Greece. In Chapter Four, ‘Tragic Pathos and Border Syndrome: Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage’, I analyse the film’s form so as to comprehend issues of mobility which are essential to (cinematic) migrant journeys.123 The film’s layered use of on-screen and off-screen mobility reveals the politics of transnational migration and their impact on the migrant’s body. These conventions and their ideological implications are unpacked through close readings of select scenes. To further achieve this, I resort to the notion of ‘border syndrome’, coined by Gazmend Kapllani in his Short Border Handbook, and to Naficy’s meditations on border subjects. It is argued that Hostage reimagines the migrant as a tragic outsider, prone to victimhood. While the film brings into relief the power dynamics that determine migration and transnational mobility, it is ultimately the migrant’s suffering body that manifests the pain of exile and hostility at the hands of the Greek nation. Moving on to a wider discussion on cultural representation, Chapter Five is entitled ‘Neither “Good” nor “Bad”: Reinventing Albanian Identities in Eduart and Mirupafshim’.124 Taking Eduart (Antoniou 2006) as its departure point, this chapter looks into discourses of criminality and exclusion that targeted almost exclusively Albanian immigrants in the early 1990s and 2000s. Alongside Eduart, See You is included for an original evocation of Albanian identities and explores the grey area between clichés of either ‘bad’ (illegal immigrants and presumably criminals) or ‘good’ Albanians (submissive victims of racist violence). Eduart and See You screen unfavourable Albanian identities, directly confronting public fears and liberal constructions of migrant identities. This chapter thus launches a broad debate on identity and how Greek immigration cinema offers an alternative to xenophobic media discourse. In similar fashion, Chapter Six looks into cinematic encounters of Greeks with migrants and refugees. The title ‘Others/Mirrors’ designates a major function of otherness as a mirror of dominant identities. In

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other words, amidst a wider crisis of identity after 1989, films conjure the migrant ‘stranger’ as a mirror of indigenous Europeans’ alienation. From the outset, we are dealing with a hegemonic discourse, particularly since filmmakers adopt binaries, reproducing a hierarchy of belonging rather than greater inclusion. What their films have in common is the question of hospitality, which becomes urgent when the Greek protagonist is directly faced with a disenfranchised migrant. The films therefore ask what it means to do ‘the right thing’. Correction/Diorthosi (Anastopoulos 2007) and Man at Sea (Giannaris 2011) feature a Greek man who, in order to overcome any reluctance and embrace the ‘Other’, must himself become ‘Other’. Plato’s Academy (Tsitos 2009)125 and Eternity and a Day/Mia Aioniotita kai mia Mera126 (Angelopoulos 1998) suggest that the Greek protagonist must first see himself in the figure of the ‘Other’, as if in a semantic mirror that reflects the alienation of Greeks in the era of globalisation. Either way, the migrant maintains a peripheral function. The discussion thus focuses on the potential of Greek migration films to reinforce non-belonging and how transnational filmmaking is often pertinent to a Eurocentric imagination. Chapter Seven, ‘Our Own People? Repatriation, Citizenship, Belonging’ looks at the repatriation of Greek-speaking Orthodox populations. Amongst the diverse populations migrating to Greece in the 1990s were also thousands of so-called ‘co-ethnic’ Orthodox Greeks from southern Albania (one of the Irredenta of Greece, known as Northern Epirus) and the Black Sea Region (also known as the Pontic region). Three films have dealt with the agenda of repatriation and its problematic ideological background: From the Snow,127 From the Edge of the City/Ap tin Akri tis Polis (Giannaris 1998) and Xenia (Koutras 2014) expose the essentialisms of national identity, evoking simultaneously the bewilderment of co-ethnics, who were welcomed as strangers. Despite many differences in form, all three films put the very notion of repatriation to the test and tackle head-on patriarchal discourses that figured prominently in the country’s nationalist programme. Three films articulate the mass migration of refugees in Chapter Eight, ‘Migration Without a Face’. Indeed, The Suspended Step of the Stork, Ephemeral Town and The Way to the West/O Dromos Pros ti Dysi (Katzourakis 2003) merge conventions of art cinema and documentary in order to challenge public indifference and the very concept of a ‘crisis’. In their venture, filmmakers convey mass migration as a tragedy of displacement and homelessness. They expose the host nation’s reluctance, the new world order of globalisation and the hardships of refugees, trapped in a perpetual search for a home away from home. The debate on representation is extended in order to critically engage with problematic notions of

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anonymity common in representations of refugees. It is argued that, in their attempt to humanise refugees and screen mass migration as a tragedy, filmmakers reinforce the silence and victimhood of refugees, ‘the prototypical face of the emergency’ according to Craig Calhoun.128 In the final chapter, ‘Documenting Crises: Raising Awareness through Documentary Film’, I focus on the most recent efforts by Greek filmmakers to direct attention to the ongoing refugee crisis. Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good (Tsakiris 2017) and 4.1 Miles (Matziaraki 2016), deal head-on with the plight of refugees in Greece, revealing the indifference of the European community and the difficulties faced by Greece to manage the situation amidst its financial crisis. In addition, Angeliki Kourounis’s Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair/Hrysi Avgi: Prosopiki Ypothesi (2016) sheds light on the trajectory of Golden Dawn from minority party to parliamentary member, exposing its racist rhetoric and attacks on migrants and political dissidents. The discussion thus focuses on cinema as a means of raising awareness, of politically engaging with endemic xenophobia and challenging cultural perceptions. Ultimately, this chapter aims to show the potential of Greek cinema to document the plight of refugees in ways the mainstream media and political establishment overlook.

Notes 1. Santaolalla (2010), p. 152. 2. I will be using the term ‘migrant’ rather than ‘immigrant’, adhering to Nicholas De Genova’s problematisation of the terms ‘immigration’ and ‘immigrant’. As de Genova suggests, these terms take at their centre the experience of the receiver country rather than that of the migrant and draw an ‘implicitly unilinear teleology (posited always from the standpoint of the migrantreceiving nation state, in terms of outsiders coming in, presumably to stay)’ (2002, p. 421). In his work on Mexican migrants to the United States, De Genova explains that the category of ‘immigrant’ connotes ‘an essentialized, generic, and singular object, subordinated to that same teleology by which migrants inexorably become permanent settlers and the U.S. nation state assumes the form of a “promised land”—a self-anointed refuge of liberty and opportunity’. Such a framing of ‘immigrant’, in search of an imagined ‘promised land’ applies to Europe as much as to those looking towards the United States. See De Genova (2002). 3. Loshitzky originates the term in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus where it appears as ‘Festung Europa’ (2010, p. 1). 4. Galt (2006), p. 1. 5. Collinson (2000), pp. 301–20. 6. Gott and Herzog (2015), p. 1.

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7. Hall (1992), p. 47. 8. Allegations that migrants disturb the homogeneity of the Greek nation and taint the country’s culture and religion have been rife since the late 1990s. An immediate target is schoolkids. Rodanthi Tzanelli has written on the vexing issue of Albanian and other foreign school flag-bearers during marches for national commemorations. According to her research, there have been numerous cases of pupils who, thanks to their excellent grades, merit the role of flag-bearer, but who have been deprived of the honour because other pupils, parents and local communities have strongly opposed it. See Tzanelli (2006), pp. 27–49. In the last ten years, racist (Islamophobic) claims to keep refugee children out of schools have grown as well, as they are seen as a pollutant tainting the indigenous culture and religion. 9. Calotychos (2013), p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Petrie (1992), p. 3. 12. Loshitzky (2010), p. 8. 13. Bauman (2016). 14. Gott and Herzog (2015), p. 4. 15. Papadimitriou (2018b), pp. 215–34. 16. See the following films for a corpus on the subject: Better the Devil You Know/ Papoutsi apo ton topo sou (Sakellarios 1946), Dollars and Dreams/Dollaria kai Oneira (Daifas 1956), The Aunt from Chicago/I Theia apo to Sikago (Sakellarios 1957), Fanouris and his Clan/O Fanouris kai to Soi tou (Ioannopoulos 1957), The Uncle from Canada/O Theios apo to Kanada (Fylaktos 1959). See also the following literature: Delveroudi (2004); Ksanthopoulos (2004); Sotiropoulou (1995). 17. King (2000), p. 7. 18. In fact, the only existing policy at the time dated back to 1922 and regarded the repatriated Greeks of Smyrna. 19. Calotychos (2013), p. 2. 20. Fakiolas (2000), p. 58. 21. Gedeshi (2002), pp. 49–72. 22. King (2000), p.7. 23. Lazaridis (1999), p. 110. 24. Karalis (2012), p. 237. 25. One can discern the importance of borders and ethnicity in the Balkans and Greece when contemplating the ongoing dispute on the recognition of the state of Macedonia, which was finally renamed from Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (abbreviated as FYR Macedonia or FYROM) to North Macedonia, which the majority of Greeks cannot accept. 26. For a detailed and historical overview of the country’s efforts to cast away its Balkan affiliations and to be accepted by the European forces see Tzanelli (2002). 27. Karalis (2012), p. 246.

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28. This kind of logic persists even twenty years on. Apropos the building of a casino and skyscrapers on the abandoned premises of the old airport at the area of Elliniko, the Minister of Growth Adonis Georgiadis, has declared that ‘the casino and skyscrapers of Elliniko symbolise a turning point for Greece from the last Soviet state of the Balkans to a proper Western country, just as the Parthenon for Athenian democracy’. In I Efimerida ton Sintakton, 15 October 2019. Available at https://www.efsyn.gr/stiles/ meteoros/214863_paidi-malama?fbclid=IwAR1ErBeX98Ouu_WYrndPgEe8mLfj5UteCMZXdoygBYa45SKQb6ewvgzbeAA. Accessed 15 October 2019. For more on the concept of ‘Balkanism’ and western views on the Balkans, see Mazower (2000). 29. This has its roots in a historical belief that Balkan nations and people were inherently violent and primitive, an issue that finds its corresponding explanations in the discourse of ‘Balkanism’ which has been widely theorised in connection to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Rosalind Galt emphasises that ‘[L]ike Orientalism, Balkanism is a form of colonial discourse, in which the peoples of the Hapsburg and, more so, Ottoman Empires were historically viewed as savages from a west European point of view’ (2006, p. 135). 30. See for example the labelling of Greek émigrés as ‘dirty Greeks’, in 1920s America. 31. Kapllani (2010), p. 110. 32. Anderson (2006), p.6. 33. Eleftheriotis (2001), pp. 7–8. 34. Gellner (1983), pp. 48–9. 35. A good example would be the famous utterance by revered former prime minister and major political figure Andreas Papandreou that ‘Greece belongs to the Greeks’. 36. Papailias points out the most dreadful implications of sweep operations: ‘The skoupa of summer 1999 is considered to have been one of the most brutal undertaken in the 1990s. The Ministry of Public Order announced that migrants without papers, including those who simply did not happen to have their papers with them during spot searches, would be immediately deported. In order to demonstrate its new tough stance on illegal immigration, the government even encouraged television channels to broadcast scenes of migrants who had been rounded up in stadiums awaiting deportation’ (2003, p. 1075). 37. Papailias (2003), p. 1075. 38. Konstantinidou (2001), p. 94. 39. Triandafyllidou and Veikou (2002), p. 191. 40. Loshitzky (2010), p. 3. 41. For more on Greek and Albanian national assertion in the twentieth century see Mazower (2000, pp. 104–28), Tsitselikis and Hristopoulos (2003) and Mpaltsiotis (2003).

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42. For Albanians and eastern European populations it was easier to reach Greece through the northern border. Poles, for example, usually made their way through legal channels while Albanians were able to cross over easily thanks to geographical proximity and because the mountains and the coastlines of islands could not be easily guarded and fortified (King 2000, pp. 8–9). 43. In Greek, the official terms used vary from ‘detention centres’ to ‘welcome centres’ to ‘data processing and identification centres’. The latter implies more directly the screening metaphor that Loshitzky mentions in relation to screening tactics (like airport scanning) and film as a means of screening (2010, p. 3). In these, refugees are separated from migrants who are most likely kept and eventually sent back. 44. Birchfield and Harris (2019), p. 35. 45. Catrin Nye, ‘Children “attempting suicide” at Greek refugee camp’, in BBC News, online at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45271194?. Accessed 12 October 2019. 46. A refugee is a person who, ‘owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’. From the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, available at https://www.unhcr.org/4ae57b489.pdf. Accessed 27 April 2020. 47. Ticktin (2010), p. 4. 48. Ibid. 49. Ballesteros (2015), p. 12. 50. A report by Newsweek, based on evidence by Médecins sans Frontières, refers to many incidents of sexual violence in Moria against refugee children. Doctors in fact reported they were treating one rape victim per week, the youngest being just five years old. The manager of Moria, Yannis Mpalmakakis, who was appointed directly by Syriza, referred to the Newsweek report as ‘fake news’ and additionally rejected reports of suicide in the camp. See ‘“Fake news” to reportaz tou Newsweek gia ti Moria leei o dioikitis tou KYT’ [‘“Fake news” claims the manager of the camp about Newsweek’s report on Moria’] in Ta Nea 15 October 2018. Available at https://www.tanea.gr/2018/10/15/ greece/fake-news-to-reportaz-tou-newsweek-gia-ti-moria-leei-o-dioikitis-toukyt/?fbclid=IwAR0kYh2n7A8Zc-CFp9OjNo0ahGzWnyFbvDj0qy0kL96nJrw8Of8NZkmMjd0. Accessed 30 April 2020. 51. The signing of a deal with Turkey to implement pushbacks, led to further break-ups within Syriza. In particular, a group of MPs who went by the name ‘the 53+’, opposed the decision claiming that pushbacks violated the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. For more on this see ‘“Emfylios” ston Syriza gia ti simfonia me tin Tourkia’ [‘“Civil war” within Syriza for the agreement with Turkey’] in I Kathimerini, 11 March 2016. Available at https://www

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52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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.kathimerini.gr/852891/article/epikairothta/politikh/emfylios-ston-syrizagia-th-symfwnia-me-thn-agkyra. Accessed 30 April 2020. ‘Ratsistikes methodevsis: nosokomiaki perithalpsi mono gia Ellines!’ [‘Racist manoeuvres: hospitalisation only for Greeks!’] in I Avgi, 20 August 2019. Available at http://www.avgi.gr/article/10840/10127537/nosokomeiakeperithalpse-mono-gia-ellenes-. Accessed 16 October 2019. ‘Mitsotakis foresees an invasion and commands stronger measures on restraining migrant flows – the gaps in the asylum law’, in Newpost, 1 October 2019. Available at http://newpost.gr/politiki/5d931f3b1fd5 b49445ef1145/o-mitsotakis-vlepei-eisvoli-kai-dinei-entoli-gia-aystirametra-sto-metanasteytiko-poia-einai-ta-kena-sto-nomo-gia-to-asylo. Accessed 9 October 2019. ‘adonis-georgiadis-eikona-eisbolis-oi-barkes-me-toys-metanastes’ [‘Adonis Georgiadis: “an image of invasion”: boats with immigrants’]. Available at https://tvxs.gr/news/ellada/adonis-georgiadis-eikona-eisbolis-oi-barkesme-toys-metanastes-binteo. Accessed 6 October 2019. See https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/greece/ report-greece/. Accessed 21 October 2019. Dell’ Orto and Wetzstein (2019), p. 3. Ballesteros (2015), p. 3. Ibid., p. 12. Loshitzky (2010), p. 9. Santaolalla (2010), p. 152. A study profiling audiences in Greek venues remains to be done. With the exception of Hostage, information about audiences with a migrant background is still unavailable. Ponzanesi (2012), p. 676. It should be noted that filmmakers and film crews with a migrant background have worked in major film industries since the medium’s inception, see for instance the cases of Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang in Hollywood. European cinema has also profited by the steady presence of migrant personnel and filmmakers of a diasporic background, see for example how Fatih Akin has invigorated contemporary European cinema and respective debates. For more on the unwritten histories of migrant and diasporic personnel in European cinema see Bergfelder (2005a; 2012). Pines (1996), p. 183. Williamson [1987] (1996), pp. 173–82. Malik (1996), p. 202. Pines (1996), p. 183. Hall (1997), p. 235. See Tarr (2007), pp. 3–7; Higbee (2013), pp.1–25; Ballesteros (2015), pp. 156–67. See Ponzanesi (2012), pp. 675–90; Loshitzky (2010), pp. 61–76. Ballesteros (2015), p. 15.

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32 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

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An ideal example of such a film is Michael Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (2005). See Naficy (2001), p. 15; Higbee (2007), pp. 51–64; Higbee (2013), pp. 61–95. Naficy (2001), p. 4. Berghahn and Sternberg (2010), p. 17. Naficy (2001), p. 4. For more on mobility and the post-1989 road movie, see Galt (2006); Eleftheriotis (2010); Gott and Herzog (2015). Mulvey (2006). For an analytical discussion on travel in Greek film in the period I examine, see Lykidis (2015). Hall (1992), p. 47. Berghahn and Sternberg (2010), p. 41. Greek cinema is known for being generally insular and without international distribution and subtitling. It is also notoriously difficult to obtain DVD copies of films with the exception of the work of Theo Angelopoulos and the major figures of the so-called ‘Greek Weird Wave’, George Lanthimos and Athina-Rachel Tsangari. The case studies in this book were found on DVD thanks to the resourcefulness of a few collectors and the kindness of the directors themselves who supplied me with copies. Thanks go to Yorgos Korras for a copy of See You and Roadblocks, which are no longer available on the market. Sotiris Goritsas personally sent a subtitled copy of From the Snow, while a gentleman from the archives of ERT sent a copy of Ephemeral Town. Man at Sea is not available on DVD but was broadcast on ERT in 2016 and uploaded on YouTube long enough for me to study it. Eduart and Hostage are no longer available in Greece on DVD but I managed to buy them from a DVD rental shop in Greece that was selling out. For more on the limited distribution of Greek films and the difficulties that international scholars face in studying Greek films see Needham (2012). Schrader and Winkler (2013), p. 10. By ‘contemporary’ I mean the period from 1990 to the present. Higbee and Lim (2010), p. 9. Schlesinger (2000), p. 22. Higson (2000), p. 66. Soldatos (1995). Skopeteas (2002). Hayward (1993), p. 37. Papadimitriou (2011), p. 495. Ibid., p. 496. Chalkou (2008). Karalis (2012), pp. 163–8. Ibid., p. 193. Stjernholm (2016). Karalis (2012), p. 218. Kokonis (2012), pp. 37–53.

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99. One particular scene in the film is characteristic of the kind of stereotypes circulating in Greece in the 1990s. A director of a private TV channel, played by popular TV actor Spyros Papadopoulos, selects female dancers for a dance number based on the appearance of their ‘tits’ and ‘ass’, remarks which don’t generate a response by the sparsely dressed passive Ukrainian women who don’t speak Greek. Ukrainian and Russian women were especially linked to the Greek male gaze, either as exotic dancers or domestic workers and pleasure slaves of Greek men. The term ‘Rosides’ (that is, Russian women), was used primarily by men to refer to exotic dancers who were thought to come chiefly from the former USSR. An example of an Eastern European female migrant as an object of male desire features in the melodrama Liubi (Yourgou 2005). Local stud Dimitris, played by Alexis Georgoulis, falls in love with the eponymous Russian carer of his ailing mother, but fails to free her of her bonds, surrendering to the expectations of his social surroundings and patriarchal insitutions. In the film, Liubi appears as a tragic victim of expectations placed from the sending and host nation, revealing the greater burden that migrants face, especially women. At the same time, she has little agency and appears most often voiceless, submissive and sad, reinforcing the more positive stereotypes surrounding migrant representation. The film, although a tender rendition of unfulfilled love and depiction of a female migrant’s travails, tells us more about the Greek family and its male protagonist than the migrant heroine. 100. Eleftheriotis (2006), pp. 101–12. 101. Eleftheriotis (1993), pp. 233–42. 102. Papadimitriou (2011), p. 495. 103. Higson (2000). 104. Ibid., p. 68. 105. Ezra and Rowden (2006). 106. Eleftheriotis (2012), pp. 339–58. 107. Iordanova (2010). 108. Higbee and Lim (2010), p. 8. 109. Rawle (2018), p. 2. 110. Higbee and Lim (2010), p. 8. 111. Rawle (2018), p. 2. 112. Ibid., p. 2–3. 113. Eleftheriotis (2001), p. 50. 114. Higbee and Lim (2010), p. 10. 115. Ibid., p. 18. 116. Papadimitriou (2009), p. 49. 117. Papadimitriou and Tzioumakis (2012), p. 9. 118. Kazakopoulou and Fotiou (2017). 119. Papadimitriou (2009), p. 49. 120. http://filmiconjournal.com/journal. 121. Shohat and Stam (1994).

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122. For a concise version of the discussion on Bujar Alimani see Phillis (2017a), pp. 1–17. 123. A shorter version of this analysis is available at Phillis (2017a), pp. 1–17. 124. Another version of this chapter can be found in Phillis (2019), pp. 35–59. 125. A shorter version of the analysis of Plato’s Academy can be found in Phillis (2017b), pp. 231–59. 126. A shorter version of my analysis of Eternity and a Day can be found in Celik Rappas and Phillis (2018). 127. For a more concise version of the discussion of From the Snow, see Phillis (2017b), pp. 231–59. 128. Calhoun (2010), p. 33.

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C HA PT ER 1

Looking Across (Greco-Albanian) Borders: Diasporic, Migrant and Supranational Filmmaking

Migration and cross-border movement have played a significant part in shaping major film industries. We have seen this with the exile of established auteurs like Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch from Germany to the United States, and Roman Polanski from Poland to Britain and then also to Hollywood. The dynamic forces of migration and diaspora have become a major clause in film studies since the 1990s. Innovative scholarly research in European film history has brought to our attention the contributions of film personnel with a diasporic background,1 established national cinemas have been reexamined through the lens of transnational film studies with a focus on coproduction2 and scholars have gone as far as to revise early film history by addressing the legacy of postcolonial and Third World émigrés in the creation of large industries like Britain’s.3 The growing field of diasporic film studies4 has demonstrated the impact of migrant flows on national cinemas and the very concept of national cinema, besides their role in altering the cultural makeup of host nations. But it is not only postcolonial subjects or Third World people moving to Europe that transform the scene. Globalisation and post-Schengen Europe have facilitated international collaborations and a greater degree of movement across borders for first-world citizens, accelerating thus the shift from national cinema to a hybrid entity with international, transnational and supranational dimensions. To further comprehend and convey these changes in film production and film culture, scholars increasingly investigate the creative context, reception and dissemination of films. As we are witnessing the increasing dispersal of peoples and the perpetual migration of cultures, capital, ideologies and media, it is clear that ‘the national (and national cinema) can no longer sustain its myth of unity, coherence and purity’.5 These developments have led scholars to study film on a supranational level in order to assess ‘the cycle of film production, dissemination and reception as one dynamic process that rises above

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national boundaries’.6 Following Iordanova’s rejection of the national model, we are asked to ‘look across national borders’, a notion that dictates largely the reasoning behind this investigation of Albanian diasporic cinema in Greece7 and Greco-Albanian coproduction as a form of cultural exchange across national borders. Nevertheless, and while adhering to a critical transnationalism, we mustn’t neglect the persistence of the national, especially since cultural exchanges happen between nations and not different entities. From the late 1990s onwards, Greece has functioned as a point of meeting, crossing and permanent residence for economic migrants, some of them filmmakers and stage directors from Albania. Bujar Alimani and Robert Budina are two examples of individuals with experience in film and theatre who migrated to Greece and Italy respectively and have made films in Greece and Albania with local financial support and contributions by other Balkan partners, frequently with financial aid by the Eurimages and MEDIA programmes of the European Union. More importantly, their films very often involve a Greek cast, Greek locations and, besides Albanian, feature the Greek language. Alimani and Budina work in Greece and Albania, thus making border-crossing a textual and extra-textual device as though to exemplify the possibility of cultural exchange between the two countries which have, for over a century, witnessed a flow of people, ideas and cultures including, today, films. Although they have experienced exile and even fostered second-generation diasporic communities (Alimani’s daughter Savina is an actress and has appeared in some of the films discussed in later chapters), as filmmakers they cannot be easily classified as diasporic or migrant either, because of their personal background or their films’ creative context. Alimani and Budina in fact have made films outside the margins of the dominant cinema (be that Greek or Hollywood cinema, typically thought of as a coloniser of small-scale cinema) and host society, as though to challenge the subaltern status generally assigned to migrant and diasporic filmmakers. To quote Naficy, ‘[a]lthough some of them are physically displaced, these film-makers are not without a place’.8 Their films are partly owed to collaborations between the Greek and Albanian Film Centres and are not easily classified as diasporic, exilic or migrant according to Naficy’s respective framework even if they display obvious features of the categories. On the contrary, they indicate a far more complex web of cross-border movement and relations of centre and margin. The increased mobility and non-linear trajectories of people working in audiovisual industries means that previously demarcated categories such as diasporic/ migrant/indigenous cannot apply without obvious discrepancies. Although their achievements don’t necessarily result in mainstream recognition and

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commercial success, Budina and Alimani are not easily pigeonholed as accented filmmakers, particularly since, from a certain point in their careers, they stop displaying any accent. In other words, there is reason to think of their films as pertaining to Greek cinema, particularly those that fulfil national criteria. They are part of a nation’s cinematic output, but not of what would traditionally be labelled ‘Greek national cinema’ as they propose obvious deviations from the national cinema canon. All these developments provide ample evidence of the transnationalisation of Greek film industrial practices and have transformed Greek cinema into a complex site of interrogation and discourse where international coproduction is a dominant modus operandi and border-crossing a necessary feature. This chapter will afford a detailed examination of the work and trajectories of Alimani and Budina. I will address their films, careers and reception in domestic circles which make their work and presence inextricably linked to contemporary Greek cinema on several levels (textual, production, reception). These case studies point to an overall opening-up that in turn reflects the growing value of transnational film studies, particularly for smaller transitional nations like Greece and Albania, where the national persists in many aspects of life. I aim to ultimately show that while transnationalism, referring to exile and diaspora, can affect many ruptures, it can also affect many sutures.9

Towards a Diasporic Cinema in Greece: Bujar Alimani The term ‘diaspora’ refers to the scattering of populations from a sending to a host nation. The existence of a community and internal networks of communication between diasporic subjects distinguish diaspora from communities that form as a result of other kinds of migration.10 A common point of reference is the relationship to an actual or imagined homeland prefigured by collective longing. Memory of an ancestral homeland is the basis for diasporic collective identity, and a sense of unity revolving around identity consciousness is what allegedly ensures the community’s survival. In this respect, representations of the homeland are essential in the construction of a diasporic identity even if memories and media do not correspond to ‘homeland actuality’.11 Our understanding of diaspora formation and the relationship between diaspora and host nations has been largely dictated by a Eurocentric model which assumes linear movement from impoverished sending nations to western Europe and the peripheral existence of diasporic people in the host nation that highlights the marginality and invisibility of Europe’s ‘Others’. This would mean that reverse migration, from Greece

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to Albania for instance, is ruled out as it is an acknowledgement of a more complex and dynamic relationship between centre and margin, homeland and host-land. The automatic assumption is that subaltern status is a definitive and permanent feature of diaspora, particularly because of discrimination against migrants and refugees. Although one must not discount the lived difficulties that displacement brings and the existence of discrimination in host societies, neither should one be too quick to assume a strict hierarchy which in turn certifies a straightforward relationship between host and sending nations without first taking under consideration the rhizomatic links and paths that globalisation opens up. In other words, not all diasporas are subaltern, not all migrations are from impoverished sending nations and the relationship with the host society is not de facto hegemonic, linear and generally straightforward. Research into diasporic cinema has been for long conducted according to Naficy’s expansive Accented Cinema, which rests largely on these assumptions. Naficy has focused on the work and trajectories of filmmakers who bring and preserve their ‘accent’ and sense of displacement in the host nation. His strict focus on films and filmmaking practices marked by displacement rules out the films of transnational filmmakers whose accented status complicates the category and trust in hierarchical structures of belonging. Indeed, Naficy prescribes accented status according to the binary logic of world cinema that assigns a dominant place to Hollywood and makes other cinemas peripheral. Hollywood, he argues, is universal and uniform, an industrial and commercial complex, while the films of diasporic and exilic filmmakers are accented, made according to an artisanal and collective mode of production which figures in a mise-en-scène that embodies the director’s accent. Thus, ‘if the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that diasporic and exilic subjects make are accented’.12 Song Hwee Lim, however, is right to point out that this framework ‘contributes to a widespread but erroneous distinction between Hollywood and the rest, which continues to plague discussion of national cinemas in general and of world cinema in particular’.13 It is thus necessary to look at Greek cinema, rather than Hollywood, as the dominant centre against which the work of an Albanian diasporic filmmaker should be measured. We mustn’t forget that the diaspora, in addition, may not share the same set of privileges as local filmmakers. Albanian filmmakers like Alimani, who spent twenty-three years in Greece, are not likely to receive citizenship and thus have absolute freedom of mobility. Alimani was indeed never granted Greek citizenship. The centrality of a small cinema, which is automatically measured in relation to Hollywood,

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complicates a linear model since Greek cinema qualifies as that of a small nation, in geopolitical terms, on the global and European exhibition and distribution circuits. How would the films of an Albanian migrant filmmaker in Greece measure up within this hierarchy? Hollywood of course is a force to be reckoned with, as domestic reception is overpowered by US blockbusters, leaving little room for Greek or other films, but it is neither the only source of power nor the only centre with a periphery of ‘Other’ cinemas. We therefore need to examine our data on a micro level, all the while reminded that Greece and Greek cinema are central to diasporic film production and marginal to their bigger opponents on a global playing field. Arguably, a polycentric framework can help us outline the wider terrain of discourse and multirelationality that refute the linear power structures of cultural imperialism. Bujar Alimani left for Greece in 1992, during the crushing collapse of Albania’s frail economy that spurred mass migration to Greece and Italy. Before this, Alimani graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Albania’s capital city Tirana, where he gained his first lessons in filmmaking and painting. In Athens he experienced ‘the hell of being an [undocumented] immigrant’, unemployed and homeless, seeking the illegal and precarious work at construction sites which became the most immediate source of work for many undocumented migrants. He ‘loathed the Greek man’s racism’ but never allowed himself ‘to feel as a victim or a hero’ for enduring it.14 Alimani’s defiance resists tendencies to compartmentalise migrantdirected discrimination within wider discourses of victimhood and a Manichean framework involving a perpetrator and victim of violence. Indeed, Alimani’s trajectory would not be conceivable in the framework of victimhood which deems the migrant a marginal ‘Other’. In 1997, he became the janitor in the popular theatre venue Chora in the city centre of Athens and met Christos Voupouras and Yorgos Korras, directors of See You (1997), one of the first Greek films to address the encounter of a Greek with Albanians, as discussed in Chapter Five. Their film was made over the course of five years, during which they hosted undocumented Albanian migrants, documented their stories, learned Albanian and travelled to Albania, where they gleaned a lot of the empirical information that made its way into the film’s script. In the spirit of solidarity with the ‘Other’ that See You embodies, Korras and Voupouras offered Alimani, who had at the time a very basic training in filmmaking, the position of assistant director. Alimani demonstrates great enthusiasm about the collaboration that kick-started his own career in filmmaking: ‘They are my mentors. Korras and Voupouras opened my eyes to a new world.’ The pair also introduced Alimani to the cinema of international auteurs and turned

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him into an obsessive cinephile.15 In an interview, Alimani is keen to point out that ‘I learned filmmaking in Greece and I don’t know any other way of filming, meaning that I admired this art form by watching Greek filmmakers at work’.16 Alimani went on to direct three short films funded by the Greek public broadcaster ERT, one of the major national subsidising bodies. His first, Katoi/Kennel (2002), is the only one to deal with a migrant journey. A boy takes the trail to Greece from Albania and on the way is followed by his dog that, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant. The journey leads the boy to a Greek house, where the dog gives birth. Kennel was its director’s breakthrough, and he dedicated it to his own journey. ‘I owed it to myself,’ he mentions in an interview.17 Kennel was directed, written and produced by Alimani, a fact that vindicates to some extent Naficy’s insistence on interstitial and artisanal modes of production. Kennel conveys a hopeful message about home, placement and (re)birth, contrary to the miserabilism of many accented films involving migrant journeys of hope turned tragedy. The film travelled to a multitude of international film festivals and was awarded at Greek, Albanian and Australian festivals. Much like the dog and the boy in the film, Alimani and his film were given a place in Greece. The majority of Alimani’s films after this would travel to international festivals and Alimani would be a festival filmmaker. Indeed, an important chapter in his career has been a steady appearance at the Crossroads Co-Production Forum of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which helped foster a more ‘extrovert’ production culture geared towards a European model.18 According to its hosts, Crossroads is the Co-Production Forum, organized by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Mediterranean, Balkan and Visegrad producers with a feature film script are given the chance to meet a new network of financiers, co-producers and leading industry specialists. The program is varied and provides the opportunity to meet, formally and informally, producers, distributors, broadcasters, sales agents and consultants.19

Thessaloniki Film Festival has been instrumental in promoting Albanian films, starting with Fatmir Koçi’s highly lauded Tirana Year Zero (2002), which received the first prize. The same applies for smaller festivals like the Thrama Short Film Festival in northern Greece, where Alimani had a steady appearance. Since 2007, the Greek Film Archive in Athens has hosted an annual three-day Festival of Albanophone (sic) cinema partly curated by Alimani. This was a momentous event as it was the first major initiative that cemented professional relations between the Greek and Albanian Film Centres and popularised Albanian cinema in

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Greece.20 Alimani was categorical when stating that ‘our aim is to appeal to the entire spectrum of audiences, Albanian and other’,21 outlining an aspiration to widely exhibit Albanian cinema to all audiences possible. Clearly, film festivals are a major and arguably the only exhibition platform for many of the diasporic and migrant filmmakers who make up contemporary European cinema. Filmmakers like Alimani are appealing to festivals that tend to reproduce the logic of multiculturalism – the exhibition of diverse cultures as though in a gallery, which is at the heart of European culture and ideals. The definition of Europe in fact revolves around the notion of distinct and diverse nations coming together under the heading of Europe. The geopolitical and cultural shifts after 1989 had a certain impact on the emergence and growing popularity of film festivals, according to Anne Jäckel. They became sites for the discovery of new talent and increasingly held events for ‘cinemas of the margins’, making competition between filmmakers, and festivals, even greater. Smaller festivals are now world cinema oriented and compete directly with the major global ones.22 To quote Thomas Elssaesser, who refers to the dominance of film festivals, ‘films are now made for festivals’.23 Within this wider framework of European and world cinema exhibition, networking and production, the relationship between Greek film festivals and Albanian filmmakers points to the transnationalisation of Greek film industrial practices and an unprecedented degree of openness to a Balkan neighbour and rival nation. Albanian filmmakers living in Greece have an international reach and their films are exhibited beside those of lauded international auteurs of a diasporic/transnational cinema, like Fatih Akin. Alimani continued to make a name for himself in Greece and Albania with Gas/Ygraerio (2006),24 featuring primarily a Greek cast and spoken entirely in Greek. Gas is lauded by Greek critics and a copy of it is stored in Albania’s National Centre for Cinema. ‘Everyone at the Albanian film Centre know Gas and refer to it as an Albanian film’ Alimani points out in interview to Vena Georgakopoulou who writes about Alimani as ‘one of our own’ and a ‘compatriot’ in her text.25 The film is by all means a Greek production, coproduced by ERT and Athens-based Oxymoron Films. The cast is Greek too with the exception of Alimani’s relative Mario Alimani who has a brief role in the film. The action takes place in a working-class suburb of Athens which hosts many migrant families. The sparse plot revolves around the struggle of a single father to raise his heavily autistic son who poses a danger to himself, other children and even adults. The film’s title refers to the tragic ending which sees the desperate, jobless and outcast middle-aged father killing himself and his son with an open gas canister in a locked room. There is ground to argue that, regardless of its

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‘full-blooded’ Greek elements, save for the director’s ethnicity, Gas reflects Alimani’s experience of exile. Indeed, the film’s nameless father quickly descends into despair after being rejected by his wife who wants to place their son in a mental institution. The daycare centre cannot tend to the boy’s needs especially since he is violent with other kids and sends him home. Ultimately, the unemployed and penniless father is unable to pay the maintenance fees in his tenement building that include expenses toward communal heating. Other tenants inform him of their decision to cut off access to heating leaving father and son to fend for themselves during the cold winter. The film is shot primarily in tight, claustrophobic spaces with close-ups that blur vision, accompanied by a soundtrack of diminished notes that enhance a sense of panic and dread. In one scene, father and son join a cohort of migrants looking to be recruited for construction work but are told to leave since he is not allowed to bring the boy who has nowhere to go. At every step, the father faces rejection as the walls are closing in on him. The film embodies the phobic structures that Naficy associates with exilic life, in particular the breaking down of occupied space, permanence of claustrophobia and overall mise-en-scène that conveys entrapment and marginality. Rejection and isolation figure strongly in exilic life and one can imagine that Alimani’s first film was an indirect evocation of his first four years in Greece. Although the film is based on a short story by Sotiris Dimitriou entitled With Tooth and Nail, Alimani’s eighteen-minute adaptation can represent Naficy’s category and thus a more personal interpretation of accented cinema. Only in this case the director has not preserved entirely his accent since the film is not explicitly about an exilic subject or the diaspora, much like the films of Greek directors addressed in following chapters. In addition, it is funded exclusively by Greek sources and entirely in Greek. Gas received three awards at several Greek film festivals and represented Greece in the European circuit, another element that complicates Naficy’s category. So, while Gas is at once a Greek film, its creative background indicates the possibility of a more inclusive definition. When an Albanian filmmaker makes a film in Greece, in the Greek language and the film is celebrated in the sending and host nations, then to which one does it belong? Conversely, when Alimani makes a film in Albania and the Albanian language with Greek funding and a Greek crew, to which nation does it belong? These questions may eventually prove redundant particularly when we examine cinema looking across borders. Gas was nominated at the Thrama Film Festival in central Greece for best film in the category ‘films about immigrants’. This epitomises a tendency to compartmentalise cultural difference and maintain the status

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of immigrant for diasporic filmmakers, as though they are expected to portray solely this experience for first-world audiences. Tim Bergfelder argues that diasporic directors, like the highly celebrated Fatih Akin, attract festival accolades when their films portray Europe’s ‘Others’.26 Alimani is clear on this issue: ‘I wished to be preoccupied with matters in Greece as an equal. I wanted to escape from the margins in my profession as well and I do not seek to be the director of immigration in Greece.’27 For Jäckel, the categories diasporic/migrant can no longer apply perfectly because of shifting patterns of mobility which suggest a changing relationship between centre and margin. Collective labels have also collapsed, alongside the division between ‘Hollywood and the rest’, and many filmmakers do not self-designate in these terms, particularly if they want to escape the burden of representation.28 For these reasons, diasporic filmmakers tend to insert universal themes in their films that help them appeal to a wide enough audience rather than a marginal few. The label ‘director of immigration’ brings to the fore the ideological pitfalls of postcolonial, third and Accented Cinema. While these terms have been essential to celebrating the films of marginalised people, they often rely on the linear model of cultural imperialism that affirms the international outreach of Hollywood and the peripheral axis of smaller cinemas, which are determined against the centrality of Europe and the colonial imagination. We need therefore to take into account the more rhizomatic links and supranational platforms of communication to fully comprehend the function and value of migrant flows in filmmaking. This applies especially to small transitional nations such as Greece and Albania, as these exist on the fringes of global cinema and are built on more complex configurations of centre and margin. The creative context of Gas is one example of such a configuration which also exemplifies early definitions of transnationalism as cultural exchange across national borders. Alimani’s third short, Busulla/Compass (2007) is an Albanian production and the first with an Albanian title. It was funded entirely by the Albanian Film Centre and produced by a Greek production team. It is his first to deal with the kind of social issues pertaining to a cinema of duty and particularly with the lasting phenomenon of vendetta in the Albanian north, a popular theme in post-communist Albanian and Albanophone films.29 Alimani’s major breakthrough was his first feature film, Amnesty/ Amnistia (2011). Amnesty was released to worldwide critical acclaim and toured to over eighteen international film festivals. It is the first Albanian coproduction to be subsidised by the Greek and Albanian Film Centres and was filmed entirely in Albania and in Albanian with a Greek film crew. Alimani’s is also the first Albanian film to receive funding from the

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Eurimages project. Its principal actors, Karafil Senia and Luli Bitri, live and work in Greece and Italy respectively and have starred in Greek and Italian films. For Alimani, Amnesty is a good example of collaboration between Albania and Greece, and a very precious memory.30 The film’s creative context questions the legitimacy and fixity of Accented Cinema. Alimani, a resident of Greece at the time, directed Amnesty in Albania, crossing the border in both directions. Moreover, and contrary to mainstream expectation, he is not preoccupied with migration or exile. Amnesty deals with Albania’s transition to a market economy and the struggle between patriarchal custom and European reform, with a focus on the reform of the prison system. Albania’s transition has been a major national concern since the fall of the communist regime and has figured in the majority of Albanian films since then. If subject matter is a major criterion, Amnesty could qualify as a national Albanian film. Amnesty travelled to the prestigious Berlinale, where it received the award of the International Confederation of Art Cinemas (CICAE), which was created ‘to bring together federations or associations of art-house cinema theatres under an international association, with a view to fostering cooperation among members’ and in order ‘to ensure that national and international authorities recognize and support the art-house film industry, via its representative bodies’.31 With this award, Alimani’s work is couched in terms of European art-house filmmaking and its institutions. Alimani moved to New York in 2015 and since then has adopted a cosmopolitan identity as a major player in international festivals, making films in the US on the independent circuit and in Albania with support from Greek producers and additional backing by ERT. A more plausible and pertinent elucidation on Alimani’s current status would be along the lines of Iordanova’s assertion that ‘filmmakers today work in a mode of perpetual dynamics rather than in an exilic or diasporic mode; their trans-border moves are less permanent and more project-based’.32 Nevertheless, it should be noted that Alimani continues to make films in his homeland and maintains many ties to Albania – historical, cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic. His third feature film, Delegacioni/The Delegation (2018), brought him back to Albania to address for the first time in his career the Hoxha regime. The Delegation is a coproduction between Albania, Greece and Kosovo with additional backing by Eurimages, and deals with the fall of the communist regime and European reforms. His follow-up to Amnesty, Chromium/Krom (2015), was also a coproduction between Greece, Albania, Kosovo and Germany. These collaborations arguably signal the emergence of a Balkan cinema in which Greece is a major player.

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Reconciling Double Occupancy Research into the career and winding trajectory of Bujar Alimani demonstrates the limitations of Accented Cinema and current models for the study of diaspora populations and movement in times of globalisation. Alimani’s escalation through the echelons of Greek film production and the dissemination and exhibition of his films through Greek and European channels point to a more nuanced and complex relationship between margin and centre and ultimately the reconceptualisation of these binary terms. The director’s frequent partnership with the Albanian and Greek Film Centres and ERT is telling of the bridges that transnationalism can build across nations and the opening-up of Greek cinema. In the creative context of films we are often open to a cultural hybridity that breaks with the norm. The same applies when we consider Alimani’s relationship with Korras and Voupouras on the set of See You. These ties highlight the importance of horizontal relationships based on solidarity, through transnational networks made up of Greeks and Albanians. Alimani’s friendship and partnership with the Greek director Thanos Anastopoulos and the additional bridges built from this connection further indicate the importance of solidarity33 and partnerships below the radar of the state that in turn form the interconnected links of contemporary Greek film production. Alimani’s brief but meaningful appearance in Anastopoulos’s Correction/Diorthosi (2008) as the Albanian migrant turned owner of a working-class restaurant is reminiscent of Alimani’s own trajectory and is the result of his enduring partnership with Anastopoulos. In-depth analysis of Correction can be found in forthcoming chapters. Here we will look at the only sequence in the film that features Alimani and which offers a valuable glimpse into a personal negotiation of diasporic identity. I will also discuss at length Robert Budina’s 2012 film Agon, underlining the Greco-Albanian coproduction, the Greek features in the text and the film’s clearer links to diasporic/migrant cinema. Simultaneously, Agon departs from the category, proposing more exciting ways to study contemporary Greek cinema. Both films deal with a reconciliation of double occupancy and a negotiation of diasporic identity, always looking across borders. Correction deals with the efforts of an ex-convict, Yorgos, to atone for the murder of an Albanian man in 2004 during clashes that ensued after the defeat of the Greek football team by Albania. The film is inspired by the real murder of an Albanian fan after the notorious football match between the two national teams in Athens. These events are the basis on which Anastopoulos advocates a ‘correction’ of the past and reconciliation between Greeks and Albanian immigrants, who are criminalised and

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brutalised in Greece. Anastopoulos achieves this by reversing the hierarchy of belonging, placing his Greek protagonist in the position of marginal ‘Other’. Yorgos thus embodies the misfortunes that transform the (Albanian) migrant into a subaltern victim of discrimination and racist violence. Indeed, Yorgos is willingly reduced to a silent pariah in order to atone and receive forgiveness by his victim’s widow, Ornela. Yorgos seeks work in the restaurant of Panayotis (Alimani). Panayotis used to work for a Greek boss but, according to the film’s reversed hierarchy, Panayotis is now the boss who in turn embodies the attitude of Greek bosses toward Albanian workers. In his discussion with the newly employed Yorgos, Panayotis seems immersed in the pleasures of mastery and leisure, drinking frappe and resting in his chair while Yorgos slaves away. Panayotis is happy to see that Yorgos ‘does not fear the work’ (a benchmark phrase directed often to Albanians who are seen as bodies for work) and explains with great determination that ‘if the boss asked for one thing, I would ask for two. He asked then for two and I for ten. Eventually, I bought the shop’. Panayoti’s success story reflects Alimani’s and at the same time demonstrates the meaninglessness of victimhood which de facto deprives the migrant of agency. Panayotis is indeed an agent in command of his fate who does not fit into the normalising and essentialising categories of either victim or criminal. This is the rare occasion where a Greek film portrays an Albanian migrant beyond the binary criminal/victim, which inspired me to look into the film’s creative context and how an Albanian migrant came to play such a significant, albeit short, role in the film. What’s more, Alimani’s appearance brings a layer of veracity to the film and imbues his impersonated character with empirical truth and the intricacies of real identities. ‘Do you know who works in this country? Albanians. And it is the Albanians who have children in this country and it is the Albanians who will save this country.’ Panayotis here lays out in the clearest terms the existence and growth of an Albanian diaspora in Greece34 and that living and working side by side is something Greeks will eventually have to come to terms with. Panayotis’s restaurant is a working-class kebab joint in the working-class Colonus district where migrant populations live. The restaurant serves several functions as a place of confrontation between Yorgos and Ornela, who also works there, and a space of resolution where Yorgos learns to accept the ‘Other’s world. The restaurant also serves as a supranational space where the diaspora meet and celebrate and a place where diasporic identity and belonging are strengthened and renegotiated. Indeed, one short sequence shows a wedding celebration for an Albanian newlywed couple, during which Yorgos waits on tables. The couple dances a ritual dance while guests, including Panayotis and Ornela, clap and sing. The

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groom burns a handkerchief as guests sing, clap and whistle. The celebration is shown from Yorgos’s point of view, our vision at points blurred as though to indicate his estrangement and by extension the audience’s. Indeed, the restaurant as a semantic space is a separate ecosystem that breaks from the homogeneous spaces of the Greek nation, where access and visibility are often dictated on ethnic and racial lines. Panayotis, as a character who embodies the typical Greek employer who hires Albanian ‘slaves’, has one foot in Greece and the other in Albania, firmly settled in Greece yet recreating the homeland away from home through ritual and collective belonging, reconciled with both worlds. Panayotis’s reconciled diasporic identity speaks volumes about Alimani’s transnational consciousness and identity as a filmmaker who has one foot in Albania and the other in Greece. Correction features Savina Alimani as the daughter of the Albanian mother and widow. She is also the protagonist of Anastopoulos’s followup, The Daughter/I Kori (2012), while Anastopoulos is the coproducer of Amnesty and The Delegation. The two directors maintained their friendship and partnership even after Alimani’s departure, evidence of the lasting ties between filmmakers that occur as a result of migration. A renegotiation of double consciousness is at the heart of Agon. Like its predecessors, Agon is a Balkan and transnational coproduction involving Greek/Albanian/Romanian/French subsidisers with the support of Eurimages. It was filmed in Thessaloniki and features both Greek and

Figure 1.1 Panayotis, the Albanian restaurant owner, enjoying the service of his Greek employee Yorgos, in Correction (Anastopoulos 2008).

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Albanian and a mixed cast including Greek star Antonis Kafetzopoulos. Kafetzopoulos also plays the protagonist of Plato’s Academy. Kafetzopoulos’s character in the latter, Stavros, a disgruntled working-class man and stereotypical Greek racist, was a source of inspiration for Robert Budina,35 who gave him the role of Nikos,36 the Greek paterfamilias and father-in-law to the film’s Albanian protagonist, Saimir. Incidentally, Kafetzopoulos’s character shares some of the xenophobic sentiments and overall character traits of Stavros that make him recognisable to mainstream Greek audiences as a template Greek persona. Arguably, there is a dynamic dialogue between films of the host nation and diasporic filmmakers which happens beyond the borders of Greek and European film exhibition routes.37 Agon tells the story of Saimir, a first-generation migrant who has gained a firm footing in Greece. Saimir lives in Thessaloniki, has learned Greek and is set to marry Electra. He works at her father’s garage and is planning to buy an apartment in order to start a family. His plans and stable life are deeply unsettled when his younger, rebellious brother, Vini, moves to Thessaloniki. Unable to integrate and hold on to a job, Vini is lured into the world of the Albanian mafia and falls in love with Majlinda, the wife of mafia boss Keno, who plans to sell her through his trafficking ring. Saimir struggles to keep his brother out of harm’s way and at the same time maintain a sense of peace in his host family as Nikos’s business and well-being are threatened by Keno and his gang. The film ends with Vini being shot and Saimir, Electra and Nikos heading to Albania to bury him. On the surface, Agon is about the clash of two generations and a family drama, but on a deeper level Budina’s film conveys the migrant’s struggle to reconcile diasporic identity, to negotiate the homeland with the host-land and reconstruct home away from home. It qualifies as a diasporic film that reflects its director’s double consciousness and his own struggles to settle in the host society and obtain the means of selfrepresentation. Yet, in 2012 Budina had already moved back to Albania from Italy, where he had resided for a mere three years. He obviously carries a migrant’s consciousness, having endured the same difficulties and pressures as generations of Albanians in Greece and Italy, but his residential status and project-based movement across borders complicates things further. And yet, the film displays key features of diasporic cinema shared by the majority of films on Albanian migrants by Greek directors discussed in this book. Only in this case, an Albanian filmmaker is at the helm, making migrant representation more politically potent. Indeed, Agon is the only film dealing with Albanian migrants in Greece and made in Greece, directed by an Albanian filmmaker. Instead of diasporic status, Budina seems to project a different currency of filmmaker as an Albanian

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man looking at the diaspora from the outside, moving temporarily from home to the spaces of diasporic life. In any case, the film’s national criteria provide good ground to address Agon within the wider context of contemporary Greek transnational cinema. Agon is the only film in the corpus to convey the struggle of integration and reconciliation from the migrant’s point of view. This happens on two levels: at first the plot develops around the separate trajectories of Saimir and Vini. The former follows all the legal and slow channels toward integration while the latter crosses the border illegally and quickly enters the underground criminal world, unable to handle the daily harassment of Greek bosses and the strife of manual labour that doesn’t suit his creative and rebellious spirit (Vini has a passion for painting). Saimir is shown getting baptised in an Orthodox church, with an expression of discomfort, yet enduring it while Electra and Nikos look at him with contentment. Vini on the other hand lashes out at his boss and accuses Saimir of abandoning his family, claiming that he is marrying Electra merely for the legal papers. Regardless, though, of their different trajectories in the host society and different dispositions, their experiences are equally traumatising. On a second level, the film deals with the concept of family, one very dear to Albanians at home and in exile, as a major push factor of Albanian migration was the sustenance of the family at home. In this respect, many sequences revolve around Saimir’s efforts to please his foster family and to convince his xenophobic father-in-law that he is a fitting match for his daughter. Clearly, patriarchal values are similar across Greco-Albanian borders. This, however, becomes increasingly difficult as Keno’s menacing world disrupts Saimir’s peaceful integration and the stereotype of Albanian criminality threatens Nikos’s family. One key sequence is telling of Keno’s trajectory as a diasporic subject in a hostile host society which has led him, like Vini, into the underground. Keno and his gang break into Nikos’s garage looking for Vini and Majlinda, who have eloped. The ensuing dialogue brings to the fore the systemic violence that pushes migrants to criminality: Nikos: Bloody Albanians, the police will come now and will fuck you. Keno (smashing car windshields): They will not! They put me in prison and you took my money but now I fuck you!

Although loaded with clichés, Keno’s words foreshadow where Vini’s path will lead to, all the more pointing to the rewards that Saimir has reaped through patience and endurance. Above all, the difference between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Albanian, from their own point of view,

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provides a valuable lesson on integration and insights into diasporic identity and the alleged criminality of Albanian immigrants. And yet, behind the stereotype of the Albanian criminal is a ‘good guy disappointed by his own personal experience’ according to Budina, who elucidated on this in our discussion:38 During my stay in Italy, I had a lot of life experiences and I understood that the most difficult thing for an emigrant [sic] is to be involved in the new society. This is for me the main matter. I met a large spectrum of people from the simple immigrant to the Albanian ‘criminals’, I understood that behind every criminal experience there was a personal disappointment or abuse. Those matters touched me very much, and that’s way I decided to tell them in a film. In my film there aren’t negative characters, but only positive ones that are possessed by the revenge against a society that didn’t give them the chance to be ‘good guys’.

For Budina, the answer to reconciling diasporic identity lies very much in the image of a content Panayotis in Correction, holding on to the positive elements of both worlds, and in Agon, in the concept of family observable in Saimir’s painful but tenacious efforts to be accepted by his Greek family but not to sever at the same time all ties with his Albanian family, standing by his younger brother at all costs. Budina again: Saimir tries to find a balance between the new, Greek family, that represents his future, and the Albanian family, that represents his past, and his roots. Finding this balance is not easy, because in order to marry his Greek girlfriend, Saimir must change his religion and his name to be accepted in the new community. However he is torn between pleasing one side over the other, but tries to be considerate and respectful of both.39

Despite everything, integration is easier for Saimir because he has instilled within him the best values of Albanian culture, as Budina remarks: [Saimir] has inherited from his family traits such as a parent’s care for the children, the love and care of the elder brother and sister for the younger ones in the family, the incredible close relationship between the family members. Unlike the western culture where the individuality and self is the emphasis, the Albanian culture portrays [sic] a very strong bond within the family and its communal aspects. With the death of his father, Saimir finds himself to take on the role of the father figure for his younger brother. It is this caring and loving aspect of his character that drew in his Greek girlfriend, Elektra and her father, Nikos, who sees in Saimir stability for the future of his daughter.40

The challenges of a diasporic Albanian like Saimir and the constant balancing act that is involved in the reconciliation of diasporic identity

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emerge when both families meet in several sequences that emblematise culture clash and Saimir’s dual loyalty. Saimir’s uncle needs urgent eye surgery, which he can have in Greece. The unexpected visit of aunt, uncle, cousins and their kids comes with the kind of humour that culture clash often provokes and the ethnic stereotypes associated with big families from Balkan regions. The nearly comical image of the Albanian family, seeming out of place, standing between a confused Electra and a nervous Saimir trying to deal with their sudden arrival is telling of the uncomfortable coexistence of different cultures under the same roof. Saimir is confronted by Nikos, who insists that he first deal with his own problems and then with those of his family, hinting that Saimir belongs exclusively to one family and revealing Nikos’s ignorance of what diasporic belonging implies. Saimir is also antagonised by Vini, who reveals to the family that Saimir got baptised and is now called ‘Thanasis’. At the same time, Electra lashes out at the uncle when he orders her to do all the household chores. When Nikos pays an unexpected visit, shocked by the number of visitors, he angrily shouts at Saimir ‘this is not hospitality, this is a refugee camp’, bringing to mind the gross, benchmark xenophobic rhetoric of Stavros in Plato’s Academy. In the middle, Saimir stands torn between his loyalty to both families and his struggle to become integrated. The evocative finale brings Budina’s vision of reconciliation full circle. Saimir, Nikos and Electra travel in the opposite direction from which Vini came, indicating further the film’s aspiration to cross borders and bring closure between Greece and Albania. In the back of their van is a coffin with Vini’s corpse. This gesture, as though to heal the Albanian nation by returning its sons from exile where they perish, is repeated at the end of Correction, a nationalistic trope that nevertheless signals resolution between both countries. At the same time, Electra is pregnant and Nikos has changed. The image of Nikos standing at a crossroads in the mountainous region of Vlorë brings forth his being out of place at the border as he asks a local for directions. At the end, everyone is at peace with the union of both worlds, but Saimir has had to suffer obvious losses. How then does Agon qualify as diasporic or migrant? On its surface it shares many themes with films by internationally renowned diasporic filmmakers like Gurinder Chadah, who has dealt with diasporic communities and hyphenated characters in Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002), two films which feature prominently in diasporic and transnational film studies. Unlike Chadha, Budina studied film at home in Albania and started making films only once he returned to Albania from Italy, where he stayed for three years during the early 1990s. In Italy he met with too many obstacles because of his illegal status and

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Figure 1.2 Saimir standing, forced to choose between his Greek and Albanian families, in Agon (Budina 2012).

decided to return in order to study filmmaking at the Tirana School of Fine Arts (where Alimani also studied). In Albania he built up his production company Erafilm, and works as a playwright, filmmaker, and producer. In 2019 he was at the forefront of the struggle against the demolition of the National Theatre as a spokesperson of the Alliance for the National Theatre, a civil society organisation fighting to preserve the status of the building.41 Budina shares little with other diasporic filmmakers, even though his first feature film is based on essential themes of diasporic cinema. Unlike Alimani’s early films, there is little reason here to think of Agon as an ‘authentic’ evocation of the director’s struggles in Italy. Agon in fact is concerned with the travails of many young Albanians and the struggles of any foreigner to integrate. In this respect, Budina has tried to make a film with ‘universal themes’, as though to resist the kind of strict classification that Alimani encountered, for example at the Thrama Film Festival. It is important therefore to place Agon in two categories. Firstly, it is a Balkan film coproduced by several Balkan partners and funded by the national film centres of Greece and Albania. In this respect, it is an Albanian film to the same extent as it belongs in a corpus of Greek migration cinema. The film per se takes place in Greece but deals with a major predicament of the Albanian nation. Agon is thus a potent example of the power of transnationalism to effect sutures. In textual and extra-textual terms, Agon is exemplary of the term coproduction and thus a collaborative film. On a second level, it is a transnational film, with migration, border-crossing and cultural difference inscribed in its core. It represents contemporary European filmmaking that crosses many scholarly borders,

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resisting classification, thus asking what happens when migrants and neighbouring filmmakers cross national borders.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

Bergfelder, Harris and Street (2014). Bergfelder (2005b). Bergfelder and Cargnelli (eds) (2008). See Naficy (2001); Berghahn, and Sternberg (eds) (2010); Berghahn (2013); Zalipour (ed.) (2019). Lim (2012), p. 129. Iordanova (2010), p. 61. As Greece transformed in the 1990s from a former sender to a host of migrants, a diasporic and migrant cinema developed there, so this is a recent development with few examples. Greece is obviously not a colonial nation with a postcolonial diaspora like Britain, where diasporic cinema has proliferated since the 1980s, or France, where Beur cinema is a major source of production and site of academic research. A more developed and well-established diasporic and migrant cinema in Greece would require greater fostering by the state and access to the means of representation that in turn foster visibility. This is furthermore due to the fact that Greece is a point of transit and has not dealt with the smooth integration of migrants. Naficy (2019). I am paraphrasing here Gareth Jones’s affirmation that ‘transnationalism can affect as many ruptures as sutures’ (2010, p. 281). Butler (2001), p. 205. Ibid. Naficy (2001), p. 4. Lim (2012), p. 140. Georgakopoulou (2006). Ibid. ‘Mpougiar Alimani: sti Thessaloniki me “Amnistia”’ [‘Bujar Alimani: in Thessaloniki with “Amnesty”‘], interview for Eksostis. Available at http:// www.exostispress.gr/Article/%CE%9C%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%85% CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%81-%CE%91%CE%BB%CE%B9% CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B9. Accessed 21 December 2019. ‘I perrisoteri anthropi ine eglovismeni se filakes’ [‘Most people are trapped in cages’, interview with Bujar Alimani). Available at https://www.ksm. gr/%C2%AB%CE%BF%CE%B9-%CF%80%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B 9%CF%83%CF%83%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%BF% CE%B9-%CE%AC%CE%BD%CE%B8%CF%81%CF%89%CF%80% CE%BF%CE%B9-%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B9%CE%B5%CE%B3%CE%BA%CE%BB/. Accessed 19 December 2019. Papadimitriou (2018), p. 9.

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19. Institute of Documentary Film. Thessaloniki Film Festival – Crossroads CoProduction Forum, about the company. Available at https://dokweb.net/ database/organizations/about/3dded417–1ec9–478a-bf85–21863e1a5e89/ thessaloniki-international-film-festival-crossroads. Accessed 21 December 2019. 20. The first ‘Days of Albanophone Cinema’ took place from 24 to 30 May 2007 at the Trianon Film Centre. Critics, directors, producers, scriptwriters and actors from Albania attended while a total of twenty-five films were screened. The one-week festival also saw the debuts of two Kosovar filmmakers and, lastly, a roundtable discussion was held by art historian Abbas Hoxha with the subject ‘Albanian Cinema – yesterday, today, tomorrow’ [‘Days of Albanophone Cinema’, in I Epohi, May 20 2007, URL no longer available). 21. Anagnostou, Nikos, Omileite Alvanika (Speak Albanian), found online, URL no longer available. 22. Jäckel (2010), p. 90. 23. Elsaesser (2005), p. 86. 24. Gas/Ygraerio (Alimani 2006), available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Qze7vN6k1Es. Accessed 23 August 2019. 25. Georgakopoulou (2006). 26. Bergfelder (2012), p. 72. 27. Georgakopoulou (2006). 28. Jäckel (2010), pp. 76–7. 29. See also Alive!/Gjallë! (Minarolli 2009), The Forgiveness of Blood (Marston 2011), The Albanian/Der Albaner (Naber 2010). 30. Georgakopoulou (2006). 31. Confédération Internationale des Cinémas D’Art et D’Essai, available at https:// web.archive.org/web/20120325105559/http://www.cicae.org/en/status. Accessed 21 December 2019. 32. Iordanova (2010), pp. 51–2. 33. Solidarity is a term that widely describes the means by which many Greek filmmakers have been functioning since the blast of the financial crisis. Papadimitriou stresses mutual support, crowd-funding and a general spirit of extroversion that forced filmmakers to seek support beyond state-funding sources, as major clauses in the Europeanisation and overall opening-up of Greek film production (2018, p. 11). 34. According to statistic research conducted by the Albanian statistical institute, the Albanian population in Greece has gone down by 7.7% since 2011 as jobs are fewer and pay has been reduced during the financial crisis. For more see https://www.iefimerida.gr/news/32193/economist-%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE %AF-%CF%86%CE%B5%CF%8D%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%85%CE %BD-%CE%B1%CF%80%CF%8C-%CF%84%CE%B7%CE%BD-% CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%B4%CE%B1. Accessed 27 August 2019.

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35. Personal interview with Robert Budina. 36. Asked about the choice of Kafetzopoulos, Budina responded to me as follows: ‘Yes, I was really impressed by the role of Adonis in Plato’s Academy, and I wanted him to be with us, and thanks to our Greek producer Lillette Botassi, he accepted. Adonis liked the script and his own character very much. We had a great experience working together, and I appreciated him as a great man [sic], not just the great actor that he is. Because of him, the Greek producer, the Greek crew and the great experience I had shooting the film in Thessaloniki, Greece will be always in my heart.’ 37. It is worth asking to what extent the films of the host nation are appealing to Albanian audiences and to what extent the films reach Albanians at home and in Greece. This is however an issue this book will not be addressing as it requires extensive sociological on-site research. 38. Personal interview with Robert Budina. 39. Interview of Robert Budina in Illyria, the Albanian-American newspaper, found online at http://illyriapress.com/albanias-agon-selected-foreignlanguage-film-category-2014-oscars/. Accessed 19 December 2019. 40. Ibid. 41. ‘How one theatre tells the unfolding story of Albania’s political crisis’ found online at https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-one-theatre-tells-theunfolding-story-of-albania-s-political-crisis-25939. Accessed 2 December 2019.

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C H AP TER 2

The Anxieties of Transnationalism: Reception of Immigration Films

This chapter addresses the reception and creative context of Hostage (Giannaris 2005) and Eduart (Antoniou 2006) in order to outline the transnational dimensions of films, which often lie outside the purview of the text per se. Taking these issues under consideration broadens our scope and generates new value for film discourse, according to diverse questions on the function of films as cultural commodities rather than their artistic appeal and capacity to convey the nation. Both films were received with hostility by a large segment of an audience unprepared to reflect on the marginalisation of Albanian migrants in Greece. The problematic reception of these films indicates the anxieties that transnationalism triggers in times of migration and globalisation in the European south. As European and transnational coproductions, they transcend the limitations of the nation and national film discourse and, thanks to their inherent hybridity, cannot be easily pigeonholed as purely Greek films. These films are thus ideal sites for a wider debate on the nation and national cinema, at the same time that respective frameworks of thought are eroding alongside the growing porosity of borders and pervasiveness of migration in all aspects of public life. Both films are based on true stories involving Albanian criminals and stirred heated debates on the uneven integration of Albanian migrants in Greek society. As European and transnational coproductions featuring a Greek and Albanian cast and filmed at Greek and Balkan settings, they are ideal case studies on the transnationalism of contemporary Greek filmmaking. In addition, their reception reflects Greece’s awkward transformation from sender to host of migrants. Investigating thus the creative context, reception and production of films can help scholars gauge bigger sociopolitical, cultural and ideological transformations in society. I begin by assessing the reception of Hostage in Greece and Albania and the cosmopolitan features of the director, Constantine Giannaris, which feed into the film. Hostage addresses the victimisation of Albanians

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in Greece and launches an assault against the Greek ethos. Giannaris achieves this by articulating the horrors that the migrant experiences in Greece and by adopting his point of view, thus making Hostage the first Greek film to do so for an Albanian migrant. Hostage highlights the dreadful implications of intolerance for the defenceless migrant. For Giannaris, the great gamble therefore was domestic reception and the risk for his own reputation. Hostage was indeed received with hostility by a large segment of the audience and the media. Lastly, I address the failures of film policy to foster inclusiveness at a time when transnational coproduction and cultural exchanges are dominant modes of filmmaking in Greece and Europe. Like its predecessor, Antoniou’s Eduart challenges racist stereotypes and tracks the life of an Albanian migrant. Due to the film’s predominantly non-Greek languages and settings, the director met significant resistance in her efforts to obtain a Greek certificate of nationality by the Greek Film Centre (GFC), making it impossible for her to submit her film for competition in Greece and abroad. I thus examine the nationalism underlying film policy and its impact on films, as it has ushered in a radically new definition of a national film and filmmaking practice in a country that has dealt awkwardly with the challenges of globalisation. Like Giannaris, Angeliki Antoniou encountered the nationalism of a large segment of Greek audiences who condemned the valorisation of an Albanian criminal. The evidence gathered on the reception of both case studies suggests that in order to classify them and further comprehend the place of both directors within the frame of Greek filmmaking, we would have to adopt the assertion of Alan Williams. He argues that a national cinema is one contested by national interest groups including critics and scholars alongside subsidisers, policy-makers, distributors and venue proprietors.1 Rather than asserting their value as national products and the degree to which they reflect the imagined community, Williams’s argument asks that we consider the extra-textual elements of films, including reception and the creative context (cast, subsidy, director’s background, settings), making it thus possible to look into the transnational and post-national dimensions of these films. These signal major shifts in the sociopolitical, ideological and cultural makeup of nations.

Situated, Universal, National and Transnational: Constantine Giannaris Giannaris was born in 1959 to a Greek family living in Australia. His filmmaking career began in 1980s London in the years of the AIDS epidemic

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and the criminalisation of homosexuality under Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Giannaris was a passionate devotee of Derek Jarman, whom he regards as his mentor. His identity as a director was shaped by the space that British television and cinema facilitated, in which Jarman was an influential and leading figure. Giannaris was given the opportunity to illustrate his sexual identity and tackle queer identity within the enclaves of British queer cinema and an overall vibrant artistic and cultural movement, spearheaded by directors like Jarman and Isaac Julien. This was a time of social upheaval that saw innovative filmmakers and activists emerge and lead public debate and struggle on issues involving gender, race and sexuality. At the same time, the mainstream media, led by British TV broadcaster Channel 4, started to open up to non-normative identities and to co-fund the films of directors like Giannaris among directors with auteur-status like Jarman, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Stephen Frears. One of the major projects Giannaris became involved in was the Channel 4-funded documentary Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts (1983), and afterwards he helped set up the Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Collective, which included the young student and Jarman-devotee Giannaris.2 This was a decisive time in the director’s career that enriched his cinematic cachet and provided an acceptance of his sexuality and awareness of queer overall, a means to unsettle the orthodoxy of identity along the lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationhood. This became evident once Giannaris moved (rather than returned) to Greece and ‘smuggled’ in queer cinema with his seminal From the Edge of the City (1998), which signalled a first attempt to introduce queer cinema into Greece and address desire and sexuality as salient sources of meaning. Giannaris began his career as a Greek diasporic director within the context of British cinema and television and moved on to become a filmmaker in Greece. There, he gained international appeal in major European film festivals, displaying a multitude of aesthetic, political and cultural affiliations through a personal representation of sexuality, identity and migration. Those of his films that are made in Greece are situated in the interstices of the national and transnational: they transcend the mandates of national film discourse but simultaneously evoke the imagined community as a departure point to something radically inclusive and new. His status as a purely Greek filmmaker is put into question when one looks at his mixed nationality and cosmopolitanism, and the hybridity of his films. Arguably, Giannaris is ‘situated but [also] universal’,3 diasporic, British, Greek, national, transnational and, above all, queer. Giannaris is one of many diasporic filmmakers that emerged after 1950 in an increasingly globalised world, inhabiting different national cinemas.

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Globalisation and growing cultural circuits facilitate transnational migration and cultural exchanges across borders. Globalisation has also spurred the emergence and popularity of film festivals as sites of cultural exchange. Indicative of this is Giannaris’s popularity in Europe and the United States. In 2011, his short films, entitled Shards, were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and presented by the museum’s curator, Laurence Kardish.4 Before this, his short North of Vortex (1991), with a Greek and British cast, was screened at the Tate Modern Gallery in London for the Time Zones exhibition in 2004. This is also where the first public screening of Hostage took place. Giannaris is situated and at the same time crosses borders and the particularities of national establishments. His increased mobility and his awareness of difference, alterity and of his own foreignness make him appealing to non-Greek audiences, cultural institutions and festival circuits. His cultural and national affiliations establish an impure register, particularly since these are ‘smuggled’ and ‘mixed’ with particular national and local features. According to Stuart Hall ‘diaspora speaks in our own name, of ourselves and from our own experience’.5 This, however, does not apply in Giannaris’s case since in Britain he was implicated in all things British and started speaking in ‘our name’ only once he discovered a niche in Greece. As a novice filmmaker in the 1980s, he was a member of Avant Garde British cinema, which at the time launched many challenges towards the political and artistic establishment. They did so through a radical politics of representation and formal experimentation, resorting to an aesthetic that manifests the fluidity of queer desire and queer identities. In this respect Giannaris speaks not of a Greek experience but a more universal and simultaneously personal one. This moves him away from the restrictions of nationhood, establishing a register that cannot be easily classified in existing frameworks, particularly since he moves from one homeland to another and portrays shifting and new connections. As a director with more than one homeland, which could simultaneously mean no homeland, one cannot view the filmmaker and his work as entirely national. While the transnational model seems more fitting, one would still need to consider the various degrees of difference and alterity in the director’s background and the different affiliations which suggest that his identity ‘lives with and through, not despite, difference, by hybridity’.6 Arguably, what is at once universal and situated slips easily through the cracks and cannot be cohesively classified. Giannaris returned to Greece in 1995. His films from then on, despite obvious departures from national cinema, concern all things Greek: the

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repatriated diaspora of the Black Sea region, the nation’s encounter with migrant populations, the lives of migrants in Athens and the disintegration of the Greek family. His films challenge the foundations of the Greek nation but simultaneously engage with it by being situated within the contemporary sphere of social and political upheaval brought on by migration. Despite any departures from the more exclusive frameworks of national cinema, Giannaris’s films are steeped in the national, which is to say that a film can be national without the category’s exclusive features. After all, transnational contains the national. Nevertheless, living in Greece has only heightened his alterity since, like his mentor, he is an internal exile in a country that emblematises Fortress Europe in its treatment of strangers. It comes as no surprise then that Giannaris has been leading initiatives for Gay Pride in Athens and for better awareness of queer cinema.7 He has been directly implicated in denouncing the increasingly alarming human rights violations against immigrants and refugees in Athens, openly showing his support for them and literally fighting Golden Dawn supporters in the streets.8 As a stranger in a strange land, he does not hesitate to express his non-belonging by identifying with the plight of migrants9 and referring to the plan to erect a concrete wall in 2011 on the northern border as a ‘new apartheid’ and ‘modernization of Greek racism’.10 Giannaris sees a reflection of his own oppression in the multitude of migrants. One may argue that his films are ‘an aesthetic response to the experience of displacement[. . .]’,11 which is certainly not far from the truth, but contrary to what Naficy claims in relation to diasporic filmmakers, Giannaris does not occupy an interstitial location in national circles of film production, subsidy and appreciation. He does after all figure highly in the ‘quality’ rankings of film critics and festivals and the controversy surrounding him has surely made Giannaris a household name. Giannaris discusses the various alarming social phenomena of Greece, articulating diverse identities from a distance as a foreigner simultaneously immersed in Greek society. His own identity has been shaped by the experience of emigration and his sexual coming-of-age, two individual sites of identification and struggle. While he articulates Greek identity, he also reserves a certain distance as a nomad with diverse affiliations, which bleed into his films. According to Naficy’s classification, Giannaris’s Greek films are indicative of an accented cinema, stemming from the radically diverse identities on display in the films, which speak of an experience that is alien to ‘our name’ but akin to the director’s foreign affiliations. The films of diasporic filmmakers emerge from a diverse cultural input and are characterised by hybridity. Arguably, accented filmmakers speak from a position that is in and beyond the language, culture and identity of the homeland and extend their output to the general public, as much as to the

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collective of the diaspora. Moreover, diasporic identities perpetually reproduce themselves anew, marking thus a continuously shifting cinema which sees diasporic filmmakers push the borders of national cinema outwards, embedding difference into the cultural and creative context of films featuring migrants, strangers and queers. Naficy essentially highlights the importance of difference in terms of filmic representation and as a way of mirroring the director’s diasporic identity. In other words, the director’s alterity is his or her authorial signature. From the Edge of the City and Hostage reflect Giannaris’s identity and his personal experience of exile in his alleged homeland. To also see Giannaris in terms of diasporic identity requires affirming the linearity of migrant trajectories from countries typically marked as Third and underdeveloped, to the developed west (consider for example the migration of Greeks to the US, Germany and Australia). Giannaris was born in Australia but his trajectory brought him back to Greece, while his films advocate a voice for migrants rather than Greeks away from home. Hostage extends to the Albanian community in and beyond Albania. In other words, if we were to speak of a diasporic cinema in terms of Stuart Hall’s exegesis, then Giannaris’s is an entirely new diasporic cinema. Moreover, the filmmaker appears here as an ambassador for Albanians and other strangers in Greece. Asked if he belongs to a wider category of diasporic filmmakers, Giannaris responds that ‘my films contain clear references to independent and experimental British cinema of the late 1980s. That doesn’t automatically mean that the English think of my language as purely English; neither is it purely Greek’.12 Giannaris’s elusive features highlight the pleasures of transnationalism and suggest that in a globalised world, existing systems of classification fall short of social realities and we need to rely further on the interplay between fixed identities, diaspora and homelands, difference and alterity, which all require greater unpacking. Giannaris wished to make with Hostage ‘a film about us, my own experience as a pariah, a film about the body of the immigrant but also a bit of a thriller and drama in the style of Sidney Lumet’.13 This quote adeptly exposes the formal and thematic hybridity permeating his film and is suggestive of a cinema that cannot be classified entirely as Greek, thus frustrating existing frameworks of analysis, criticism and appreciation in wider cultural circuits.

The Hostage Situation and its Aftermath Hostage is based on events that took place on 28 May 1999, in northern Greece. Flamur Pisli, a twenty-five-year-old Albanian immigrant, hijacked an intercity bus going from Kato Scholari, a semi-industrial village in Thessaloniki, to the south. Pisli demanded 50 million drachmas

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and claimed that the police had planted three Kalashnikov machine guns in his workplace, a construction site on his employer’s estate. Pisli insisted that he was framed by his employer, the local police chief, who sought illegal arms dealings with Pisli and who sent him to detention, where he was beaten and sexually abused. The journey ended in Albania, where Albanian police shot down Pisli. Yorgos Koulouris, a Greek passenger on the bus, stepped out of the bus in panic and got shot by a sniper who ‘thought Koulouris was Pisli’. Shortly after, Albanian police stormed the bus and shot Pisli point blank.14 During the hostage situation, television channel vans and police forces had formed a convoy following the bus, documenting the event and negotiating with Pisli. The trajectory of the event was broadcast primarily by Antenna TV and the talk show host Makis Triantafyllopoulos, a popular broadcast media persona then at the height of his career. In fact, negotiations were conducted mostly by Triantafyllopoulos as Pisli spent a lot of time talking to him live on Antenna radio. The aftermath saw Antenna TV’s news programme reproduce the scene of Koulouris’s corpse nine times in three minutes, drawing on the popular image of Albanian criminals.15 The hostage situation and lack of resourcefulness of the Greek police forces mirrored a previous incident in 1998, which had also been broadcast live on Antenna TV, this time with controversial newscaster Nikos Evangelatos. A Greek family was taken hostage in a tenement flat by a Romanian immigrant, Sorin Matei. The sting operation instigated more than twentyfour hours later resulted in the death of a Greek woman and a disgraced national police force. Indeed, the Greek press wrote of the Pisli hijacking as ‘a parody of the Matei incident’.16 The very next day, police forces in Athens, following orders by Prime Minister Costas Simitis, launched a sweep operation against Albanian immigrants, setting off a diplomatic conflict with Albania. Indeed, the Albanian government immediately declared that Greece was exploiting the event as an excuse to deport immigrants. Papailias interprets this initiative as ‘an attempt [of Greece] to deflect attention from its responsibilities’,17 which included smooth integration of immigrants. This conflict was resolved without further collateral damage, revealing nevertheless the intensity of Greek–Albanian relations and their nationalistic background. Indeed, the hijacking confirmed growing public sentiments that both countries must sharply redefine their borders.18 Isaiah Berlin’s insight on nationalism is useful here. Berlin argues that ‘nationalism is an inflamed manifestation of nationhood, which is triggered by a form of collective humiliation’.19 The feeling of humiliation emerging from the Greek state’s inability to protect its ‘own people’, and reproduction of the event through mass media, undeniably carried the seeds of nationalism.

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In 1998, the state accelerated an ongoing programme of modernisation, which included agreeing to a European currency while the country was preparing to host the 2004 Olympic Games.20 However, the growing numbers of undocumented immigrants and various newspaper headlines stirring mass panic seemed inappropriate at the time of modernisation. Headlines included ‘terror has spread in the city’ by conservative newspaper Kathimerini while rightist newspapers blamed Albanian immigrants for increased crime rates.21 Conservative newspaper To Ethnos demonised Albanians: ‘The people are distraught as yet another bus has been hijacked by an Albanian gangster. The Greek people demand these incidents stop . . . they endanger innocent civilians’; ‘Greece is at the mercy of Albanian criminals’. At the same time, the Minister of Public Order, Yorgos Romeos, declared that ‘the Albanians are to blame for everything’.22 With the image of a country and nation at the mercy of Albanian savagery, one can argue that a film redeeming the Albanian hijacker would be greeted with hostility.

The Film That Became a Hostage: Domestic Reception of Hostage Giannaris’s three major films have participated in the Berlin Film Festival, while they have been received with praise in the United Kingdom, Venice Biennale and the United States. Hostage was celebrated at the EU XXL Forum for European Film as ‘an ideal example of the social and political shifts in the southern European countries’. The EU XXL Forum was founded in 2003 as ‘an initiative for the advancement of European integration and for cultural exchange and which recognizes the special role of audiovisual media and the cultural, social and economic value of audiovisual productions’.23 This crucial institution for European cinephilia and film policy considered Hostage to be inherently European, revealing a film’s capacity to travel and evoke the major concerns of European nations. Nevertheless, despite critical acclaim, Giannaris’s films have had an inconsistent trajectory at the Greek box office. Up to the release of Hostage, his most popular film was One Day in August/Dekapendavgoustos (2002), which sold 95,000 tickets in total.24 Giannaris speaks of it as ‘my first attempt at a mainstream film’,25 meaning, according to the vague term ‘mainstream’, a popular box office hit based on treasured Greek sentiments and values familiar primarily to Greeks. Giannaris evokes the nation and its interconnectedness through a network narrative that highlights the invisible and elusive paths connecting Greeks through one common denominator – the three-day

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celebration of the Assumption of the Holy Mother. One Day in August is Giannaris’s least accented film, and most successful one. Indeed, Hostage sold merely 11,00026 tickets and was taken off cinema screens shortly after it was distributed to a total of twenty venues across Greece, often making it only to the late night screening of 10 p.m. One Day in August refers directly to a religious celebration which takes place in August. The film was released in the summer, designated for the popular open-air venues. Open-air venues are arguably a significant part of Greek culture. They attract large audiences who seek to go out on a hot summer’s night to socialise and see re-releases of old films that strike a nostalgic core with older generations. Open-air cinemas are in the heart of the city, open to the urban landscape, surrounded by busy roads and tenement flat balconies with a bird’s-eye view of the screen. The social space of the cinema serves as an extension of the neighbourhood thanks to its open structure. One Day in August was marketed in the context of a popular seasonal custom. The film’s popularity was predicated on the potential to bring Greek audiences closer by rekindling national sentiments in a social sphere that facilitates a sense of togetherness. Hostage was received with hostility, highlighting the expectations of audiences and the key figures that make a film accessible – primarily distributors and venues. Hostage was meant to premier on 1 March 2005 at the famous Olympion cinema of Thessaloniki. Minutes before the screening, Dimitris Kolouris, Yorgos’s father, stormed into the cinema, loudly accusing Giannaris and the audience of betraying his son’s memory. Shortly after, a bomb threat was made, leading to an evacuation of the cinema. A bomb threat was made the next day as well, and the premiere was postponed to two days later in the presence of armed police forces. Over the following days, Koulouris’s father would appear in debates on the evening news of channel Alpha. While Alpha is listed among the film’s subsidisers, its prime television newscaster, Nikos Hatzinikolaou, unleashed a hate campaign by exploiting Dimitris Koulouris, contributing further to Giannaris’s controversial reputation. In Athens, members of the Youth Front of Golden Dawn gathered outside venues screening Hostage, all dressed in black and shouting ‘kill a Greek and become a hero’. They distributed leaflets to prospective audiences displaying the image of Koulouris’s corpse with the caption ‘how many dead Greeks do you need in order to wake up?’ The nationalists emphasised that Hostage was supported by the GFC and boycotting it was necessary as ‘it may encourage tomorrow’s bus hijackers who will cause the death of more innocent victims’.27 These reactions provide some evidence to the nationalistic conditioning of a segment of Greek audiences,

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for whom the very thought of a film prioritising the experience of an Albanian migrant is anathema. This is the basic element that separates Hostage from the rest of Giannaris’s filmography, and it brings solid evidence as to the anxieties that migration films can trigger in Greece. Greek critics nevertheless maintained a celebratory tone, as in this review by Yannis Zoumpoulakis: The ‘enfant terrible’ of Greek cinema is an angry filmmaker of the nineties and provocatively expresses his personal concerns regarding a distraught society in crisis. His films disturb and agitate, but they are sincere depictions of a society plagued by racism and bigotry. This creative filmmaker offers us a stimulating account of a shocking event and thus the opportunity to reexamine it as well as all stories of racist madness.28

Domestic reception of Hostage set a precedent for future ventures. The film’s favourable approach towards an Albanian man was repeated in Eduart the following year; it too was similarly rejected by mainstream audiences. Both films received controversial criticisms and general hostility by various groups of interest, revealing that nationalist sentiments have to be reckoned with by filmmakers dealing with the image of the Albanian criminal. Indeed, director Kimon Tsakiris revealed to me that in 2011, following his success with the documentary Sugartown: the Bridegrooms/Sugartown: Oi Gabroi (2007), he submitted a script to the GFC inspired by the Sorin Matei incident. Tsakiris’s proposal was immediately rejected by an executive who said ‘did you not see what happened to Giannaris?’.29 Arguably, an incendiary approach like Giannaris’s would entail many risks for investors, who see little revenue coming out of it.

Reception of Hostage by the ‘Other’ While Hostage was received in Greece with hostility, the Albanian community in Athens and prospective audiences in Albania were excited about a film which addressed the plight of Albanians in Greece. Hostage became a major success in Albanian venues and was praised by the Albanian community of Athens. It was available on the Albanian black market and a prominent feature on Albanian national television, where it was shown once a week under the title The True Story of Flamur Pisli. ‘[W]hich is ironic,’ says Giannaris in an interview to Marina Spirou, ‘since it is not the true story’, although inspired by the actual events.30 In the film, Pisli is transformed into the character of ‘Elion Senja’, allowing Giannaris to reimagine the events. Even so, according to Laertis Vasiliou, who portrays an Albanian officer, ‘the posters advertising the film are hanging on every

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wall in central meeting points of the Albanian community. Moreover, the story of Flamur Pisli is renowned and as for Rajmonda Bulku [the actor/politician who plays Pisli/Elion’s unnamed mother], she is an idol of Albanians, wherever they may live’.31 Arguably, Giannaris’s film is one that, regardless of the director’s intentions, appealed greatly to Albanians, revealing the potential of a film to travel and become a vehicle of culture and national sentiments not only in Greece and Europe, but also in pariah states such as Albania. This amounts to a hybrid conceptualisation of Naficy’s diasporic cinema. While Giannaris, as a quasi-diasporic filmmaker, would be expected to make films in exile, evoking the homeland and the dispersed imagined community, with Hostage he evokes the pain of the Albanian diaspora in Greece. Regardless of his intentions, the filmmaker captured the sentiments of two peoples: of Greeks, through the depiction of the various Greek gender and social margins in the bus and, through the portrayal of a migrant’s journey, of Albanians in exile, where ‘their bones are devoured’ − as Elion’s mother mentions in the letter that she reads in the voice-over as the film opens. This suggests, in terms of reception, a regional and transnational phenomenon between two transitional and opposing nations, beyond the radar of national film discourse, as though aspiring to help both sides converge and to establish a more diverse national cinema. As a cultural commodity politicised by certain interest groups (corporate media, nationalist organisations and critics), Hostage became even more of a national concern in Greece, beyond its character as an artwork made by a creative genius. Thanks to the use of the Albanian language, of Albanian settings but above all to the presence of an Albanian star and the story of an Albanian migrant, Hostage is a film that appeals even more to Albanians despite its obvious objective – to question the way Greek identity is imagined. One could argue that the film appeals to Albanians for showcasing Greeks as perpetrators of violence. Moreover, by portraying the alleged rape of Pisli when he was detained by the police, the director, unbeknownst to him, evokes the embodied pain of exile. Elion is arguably a vehicle and outlet for the fragmented Albanian nation. Despite the universal appeal of the motherly figure, the character that Bulku brings to life appeals mainly to her Albanian compatriots. At the beginning of the film, we hear her in a voice-over reading a letter to Elion: ‘My darling boy, in your own land people will exploit you to the bone. In a strange land they will devour the bones as well.’ The distance between mother and son highlighted in the letter is telling of the separation of all Albanian mothers from their sons, and of the fractured nation. The national sentiments Bulku’s character sets down on paper resonate

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with Albanian culture and particularly with its contemporary history of mass migration. This interpretation of exile, equated with the suffering of an entire nation, has been told in folk songs and poems and is an integral part of the collective Albanian psyche. Songs and traditions reflecting on the experience of exile are indicative of this fascination; the film’s emphatic recasting in the Albanian imagination as a folk epic written in memory of Pisli reveals why Hostage was celebrated in Albania. At the time of the film’s release, a pirated audio cassette could be found on the black market, a recording of a rhapsody telling ‘the story of Flamur Pisli’, ‘hero of migration’ who suffered ‘the emasculating experience of migration and everyday exploitation at the hands of Greek bosses and police’.32 What in Greek media discourse stood as a paradigm of Balkan savagery and backwardness, for Albanians was a damning statement against Greek intolerance and the great achievement of one Albanian man who stumped the Greek police. The particular representation of Albanian exile might have been familiar to Greek audiences since, before becoming a host nation, Greece was itself a country of émigrés. This only came to an end around 1967, when the Greek military junta came to power, yet the public discourse that criminalised Albanians in Greece in the 1990s excluded the expression of any shared background. For a country persistently keen on European modernisation, acknowledging shared cultural and historical affinities with Albania was a major taboo.

Questioning the National Hostage is a coproduction between various Greek, European and nonEuropean contributors, private and public. It was coproduced primarily thanks to private sources, including Giannaris’s G. Giannaris Films, Highway Productions and the Turkish Sarmasik Sanatlar. The film also received the support of the GFC, the private Greek television channel Alpha, Graal Digital Creations in Athens and Strada Productions, with the additional support of the Eurimages initiative for European cinema and the See Cinema Network. It is predominantly a Greek–Turkish coproduction, a fact that designates it partly as non-European. Its nonEuropean facet is reinforced by the non-Greek cast members, the filming locations and the use of the Albanian language. The film’s cast poses challenges to established versions of national cinema. Elion Senja is played by Stathis Papadopoulos, a Pontian Greek from the diaspora of the Black Sea region, raised in Kazakhstan and in Russia.

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He is a favourite of Giannaris, who revealed in From the Edge of the City a deep fascination with Papadopoulos’s body. In that film, the actor plays a man seeking a national and sexual identity in the margins of Athens and in Hostage, he gives life to an Albanian migrant, violated and disenfranchised. While Theodora Tzimou (Iliana) and Giannis Stankoglou (Grigoris) are present in a good number of Greek films and in Giannaris’s filmography in Greece, the director is not very interested in casting Greek stars. On the contrary, Giannaris’s star in Hostage is Rajmonda Bulku, an Albanian stage and film actress and member of the Albanian Democratic Party since 2009. Bulku portrays Elion’s distraught mother. Throughout the film, she obtains a symbolic status as the timeless figure of a nurturing mother, a concept that transcends borders. Her nameless character is an indication of her global appeal. However, the problem in this case is that Greek audiences (in particular) were asked to identify with a figure which represents Albanian motherhood, and moreover the mother of a criminal whose actions resulted in the death of a Greek man. This is a tall order, since the mother is also a guarantor of the national and has been established as a symbol of tradition and familial values in Greece. Arguably, Giannaris’s favourable approach to the immigrant and Albanian mother did not appeal to an audience that was being asked to look back on a painful past and rethink its collective disposition towards Albanian migrants and Albania. The figure of the mother is very significant in the Christian Orthodox doctrine and underlines a significant aspect of national culture linked to Greek identity. In the Orthodox dogma, she is manifested in the icon of Panagia, the mother of Christ. ‘Panagia’ means ‘wholly holy’ and underlines the sacred aspect of motherhood. Elion’s mother is referred to by the Greek police chief as a ‘tragic figure’ standing with the backdrop of a misty mountain cliff, while her son has been killed as a martyr of Greek bigotry following his twenty-four-hour calvary from Greece to Albania. Her appeal to Elion evokes the sanctity of the mother–son bond and the home. In the final climactic scene, she slowly walks towards the bus. Behind her, a deep valley veiled by mist heightens the gravitas of the moment. Bulku’s performance seems entirely choreographed and staged, akin to ancient Greek tragedies. She approaches the bus and leans her head in an extreme close-up, she gesticulates and adopts different expressions of emotional angst while urging Elion to surrender. Extreme close-ups on her expressive face highlight the scene’s grandiosity. What’s more, the entire monologue is filmed in a sequence shot which is in itself monumental in its virtuosity, evoking the sweeping effect of a monologue.

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Through the universal and emotive figure of the mother, Giannaris extends his plea for tolerance. Moreover, he resorts to the codes of ancient Greek tragedy, a familiar medium to Greeks, who are asked to identify with the noble yet distraught Albanian hero driven to death by superior forces. This was quite a challenge for audiences, and a gamble on the director’s part. After the film’s release, corporate media transformed Dimitris Koulouris into a television spectacle and victim of Albanian brutality. In the same manner as Rajmonda Bulku encompasses the Albanian nation in the film, Koulouris’s father embodied the Greek and his frequent televised appearance helped articulate a collective sense of victimhood.

A Film without Nationality: Eduart Angeliki Antoniou’s seminal film Eduart is also inspired by true events. In 1991, following the collapse of Albania’s forty-year communist regime, Eduart Bako crosses the mountains to Greece, dreaming of rock stardom and escape from his patriarchal family. In Athens he frequents the shady underground as a male hustler, penniless and disgruntled. Things go even more awry when Eduart kills an Athenian man who picked him up in a bar. Rejected by his closest friends, Eduart returns to Albania and his family, where he is treated as a pariah. His father, a military officer of the regime, turns him in to the police for petty theft and Eduart is imprisoned. In prison he is befriended by a German doctor in charge of the infirmary, who takes him under his wing as an assistant. Eduart gradually learns to value human life and thus atone for his crimes and overcome his profound antisocial tendencies and self-loathing. Eduart and the doctor escape during the insurrection of 1997 which saw the opening of jails by armed insurgents all across Albania. The doctor is sadly shot and dies in Eduart’s arms. Eduart returns to Greece and confesses to the Greek border patrol. The closing sequence shows his younger sister Natasha standing under a blossoming cherry tree, a gesture that hints to the redemption of the Greco-Albanian border that has turned from a site of conflict to a site of reconciliation. By the end, the image of the prototypical Albanian murderer is redeemed. It is revealed in fact that his antisocial behaviour and criminality stem from Albanian nationalism and its lofty demands on young men who seek the pleasures of western culture and rebel against Albania’s patriarchal value system. Antoniou’s film is an ideal example of the transnational at work in contemporary Greek film production. Its creative context, representation tactics, and the text per se showcase the ‘enabling possibilities of embracing the transnational’.33 In practical terms, European coproduction has proven

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indispensable for Greek filmmakers who need to circumvent insufficient national subsidy and thus seek funds from several foreign sources. Greek migration cinema, on the level of production, emerges as European and transnational with directors often collaborating with Turkey when seeking extra-European sources. With Eduart, Antoniou embraces further Greek cinema’s transnational turn. Her film narrates the nation but not as a finite and sovereign entity, evoking instead of the Greek the Albanian nation through the emotional transformation of a marginal mobile subject who crosses national borders and breaks social taboos. The crossing of borders, geographic, cultural and ideological is a major feature here. Eduart Bako embodies mainstream fears of Greeks toward Albanians, the upheaval of the Albanian nation after communism and the seeds for an Albanian nation without the burden of its patriarchal code of conduct. In other words, the nation is present but with openness to its neighbours and aspirations to cross those boundaries. Filmed across three different Balkan locations, Eduart is an exemplary Balkan film narrating some of the region’s tumultuous events, which have spurred endemic nationalisms and conflicts. At the same time, it showcases Greece’s undesirable affiliations to the region without the profound melancholy and sense of permanent loss that Angelopoulos’s Balkan films project. Antoniou’s film proposes redemption and reconciliation between Greece and its Balkan neighbours. Although Antoniou received funding from European sources and distribution to European festivals, on the level of representation it prioritises Greece’s Balkan affiliations, thus asking audiences to think of Greek cinema as Balkan, not merely an isolated national cinema or member of European national art cinemas. The film is a Greek and European coproduction, co-financed by the GFC and the Medienboard in Berlin. Antoniou is a diasporic filmmaker living in Germany and directing films in the Balkans, Greece and Germany including television productions for the German ZDF. While the film may be regarded as a European coproduction, the cast, settings and languages used suggest an affiliation with the ‘Cinema of the Other Europe’.34 The film deals with all things Albanian: its turbulent history in the late twentieth century, the permanence of nationhood and patriarchal values and, on a second more symbolic level, the troubled relations between Greece and Albania starting at the border. This Balkan connection is particularly palpable when one considers that Greece has been at the receiving end of Albanian migration thanks to their shared border, an issue that the film tackles without the nationalism and xenophobia of the mass media. This automatically implies that the film can be claimed by several nations – particularly in the Balkans – according

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to the notion that a coproduction by definition is not the exclusive property of one nation. The film’s lead, Eshref Durmishi, is an upcoming actor from Kosovo, an area known for its civil conflicts and minority problems with Albania and Serbia. He is fluent in Albanian, English, Italian and German. In the film he speaks both Albanian and German, but we hardly ever hear him speak Greek, an issue which makes it all the more challenging to ascribe one nationality to him. Complicating this matter even more, the film deals with obvious national concerns of Albania and is filmed primarily in the capital of Macedonia, Skopje. Antoniou chose Durmishi for the role of Eduart after more than a year of casting, following an audition that took place in Pristina, Kosovo. From that point onward, Durmishi has been building a career in Greece, where he has chosen to live.35 Eduart is representative of a Balkan cinema that can travel beyond national enclaves, forcing us to consider Greek cinema as Balkan, as well as national and European, and to challenge dominant perceptions regarding the oneness of European culture and the borders of national cinema. The aforementioned points underline the hybrid nature of a film that simultaneously is and is not Greek and which could be noted and celebrated as a Greek film thanks to the director’s nationality. Thanks to the film’s creative context and transnational dimensions, one could see it as a vehicle for an inclusive Greek cinema, which showcases the aspirations of transnationalism to broaden the national without negating it. In addition, the cast’s affiliations and overall creative context become embedded in the film and serve as the backdrop of the film’s coming to being. Nevertheless, the film was met with significant resistance precisely because of these inclusive aspirations, an issue that influenced its trajectory in Greek venues and film festivals. Antoniou received national funding in the form of 300,000 euros from the GFC, 100,000 from the public television broadcaster ERT and 120,000 from the private television channel NOVA. The second largest sum was 250,000 euros from the German Film Centre. In total, the weight of production rested on Greek subsidisers, who made a 78 per cent contribution to the film while the German producers had a share of 22 per cent.36 Subsidy was primarily Greek, a fact which means that, according to European legislations (3004/2002), the film bears the nationality of the country with the largest percentage of financial participation. Nevertheless, this did not suffice to grant the film a certificate of Greek nationality by the GFC since it did not correspond to the Centre’s governing rules.37 Indeed, a single nationality for a film challenges the notion of a shared effort and cultural product.

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The legislation surrounding Greek nationality for a film, published moreover in 2010 as law number 3905, demands that in its original edition a film should contain 51 per cent of its spoken language in Greek, 51 per cent of its length filmed on Greek territory and an equivalent amount of the budget spent in Greece. Lastly, post-production must be completed in Greek studios. If the film does not cover all these requirements, then it cannot be granted Greek nationality. If the filmmaker and crew are Greek, they can submit an application to the GFC, which will in turn refer to the Minister of Culture and Tourism, a fact that cannot guarantee their film will indeed receive Greek nationality. Apart from the fact that one cannot entirely measure the nationality of a film, not to mention with such accuracy as to calculate 51 per cent, these rules imply using the law of soil as the sole token of belonging. Eleftheriotis asks what the determining factors of a film’s nationality can be: ‘It is practically impossible to discover films which are completely “pure” in terms of their national origin: even if all the crew share the same nationality, what about the nationality of the equipment, the film stock, the aesthetics of editing, the style of the clothes?’38 In other words, he emphasises the challenges coproductions pose to the very idea of a national film and cinema. In the case of Eduart, this means that the quest for a certificate of nationality contradicts the film’s mixed background. Eduart challenges governing rules on nationality, forcing us to reconsider not only the criteria of nationality but also the very idea of a Greek film. I argue therefore that a film can be national and speak ‘in our name’, but while Eduart can speak in the name of Greeks and Greek cinema, it can also speak for Albanians and be claimed respectively from both sides. If one takes these rules literally, then indeed the film does not deserve Greek nationality. Eduart was filmed partially in Greece, Albania and mainly in Skopje. The spoken languages include Albanian, German, English and Greek, which alone does not make the film ‘Greek’. Antoniou protested the decision: Why is the Ministry of Culture punishing us? First they encourage us to open up to coproduction and then the GFC takes away the film’s Greek nationality. It punishes the filmmaker so that she and her crew cannot display their work, a film that will travel to international festivals without a nationality.39

Eduart was initially caught within a web of bureaucracy and administrative protocol, which in itself is indicative of the restrictions of the national in terms of citizenship policy. In this respect, for immigrants as much as

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for a film like Eduart, a nationality is important for practical reasons as it impacts one’s freedom of movement. The language of belonging is by default exclusive and based on essentialising views. However, this notion is a double-edged knife and what it shows in this case is that a film which does not openly refer in its content to one exclusive nation, aspiring to cross borders with its background of mixed nationalities, will also confuse the borders of belonging. The film was co-funded by Greek sources and its filmmaker is of Greek origin. Both of these are determining factors which, however, did not initially suffice to grant it Greek nationality. This highlights the need for a broader set of criteria for nationality, since Eduart is a film that demands a flexible definition of national cinema. Through greater inclusion, the national and a film’s nationality can become agents of mobility instead of a source of inertia. The film requires a nationality and, moreover, one dominant nationality, since the language of belonging functions on this premise, which again is not to say that greater inclusion is not possible through this very language. To say, however, that a film does not require a nationality in any way is to cast the film into a void and denigrate its transnational dimensions. Following Antoniou’s protest, the Minister of Culture himself granted the film Greek nationality and Eduart entered the competition for the socalled State Awards of Quality. The Minister of Culture announced, ‘I am glad that we managed to overcome the bureaucratic issues around Eduart and that the film was allowed to participate in the State Awards of Quality in 2006. It is obvious that we must support Greek cinema as well as coproduction with European countries.’40 Eduart was victorious at the competition, scoring nine awards as well as rave reviews by critics, many of whom described the film as being of a ‘European standard’ and ‘brave and daring’. Eduart was further celebrated by Ronald Bergan as a film ‘that could happily stand in any company’.41 It is considered to be the breakthrough film for both its director and its lead actor, Durmishi. Yet, despite critical acclaim and the commercial value it affords, Eduart failed to appeal to domestic audiences and had a short-lived time in Greek venues. Its short presence in cinemas was partly spearheaded by rightists who accused Antoniou of making an ‘un-Hellenic’ film, bringing to mind the accusations already directed toward Giannaris. Antoniou herself blamed rightists for the film’s ill-fated reception. Indeed, many hate messages were uploaded onto Antoniou’s website and published in two popular magazines, Athinorama and Elevtheros Kosmos, two entertainment guides in Athens. As Antoniou mentions on her website, Athinorama published hateful comments on its website, which had to be shut down

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afterwards. Three letters were published in Elevtheros Kosmos informing the public that the film was favourable to an Albanian murderer who was sentenced to ‘only sixteen years in prison’.42 Antoniou blames supporters of Golden Dawn for sabotaging her film: The film was greeted with great resistance by an audience which denies any connection whatsoever to Albanians. The film was attacked by far-rightists and Golden Dawn supporters. It surely also does not satisfy many Albanians, who would have wished to see their country depicted as modern and Europeanised [. . .] the film was not made to satisfy the expectations of both sides and made no compromises.43

One can argue that the film’s themes and negative reception from a fraction of its audiences were enough to create a box office failure. Yet the reasons behind box office failure are deeper and cannot be simply attributed, as in this case, to supporters of the extreme right. To blame rightists and the ideological conditioning of mainstream audiences is indeed legitimate to a certain degree, but such a generalisation ignores the greater picture, which includes questions of audience reception in Greece, popular cinema, distribution and the impact of awards. Indeed, so many awards for a film guarantee neither that it will remain marginal nor that it will be a box office success. Examples are varying: Touch of Spice/Politiki Kouzina (Mpoulmetis 2003) swept up many domestic awards and was also one of the greatest box office hits in the history of Greek cinema. Touch of Spice is an ideal example of the transnational at work in Greek filmmaking, and simultaneously reappropriated the codes of popular cinema while appealing to audiences. The national themes displayed in Touch of Spice and El Greco (Smaragdis 2007), another box office success about a national figure, can arguably account for their appeal, but this does not automatically imply that Eduart was unappealing to popular audiences because of its favourable approach towards an Albanian. There is simply not enough proof. The lack of national specificity, in the form of language and settings, could be useful in understanding popular appeal or lack thereof. The films mentioned above, despite their many transnational dimensions, are steeped in Greek culture, history and language. They deal above all with Greek sentiments and El Greco particularly has been noted for its evocation of a genuine ‘Greek spirit’, a notion that borders on nationalism. However, the question remains whether the box office failure of Eduart was caused by the film lacking cultural specificity, or rather by a lack of production values, marketing and adequate exhibition options. All this evidence can be used to argue that Antoniou is too quick to claim that her film had little appeal

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because of its favourable portrayal of an Albanian criminal. In any case, it is evident that greater inclusion incites overall change, which is met with resistance in many areas of debate and reception. Eduart embodies a more inclusive and challenging cinema, emerging through the interstices of national and transnational Greek, Balkan and European cinema and film policy, launching a radically different definition of a Greek film. As such, it requires a wider context of debate in practice, exhibition and discourse, regardless of the director’s effort to obtain a certificate of Greek nationality. Considering the permanence of nationalism in the public discourse, it comes as no surprise that Eduart and Hostage, both of which deal with the unfavourable figure of an Albanian criminal, had such a short trajectory in Greek venues. The ill-fated reception of Eduart suggests that we should handle the film and its position within a certain culture as part of a national cinema, despite obvious deviations from traditional frameworks. In terms of production, cast and particularly representation, Antoniou’s film crosses many boundaries. It shows how difficult it is to define a national film based on similarity, continuity and cohesion. But the film is contested by those key figures that influence and shape a particular national cinema. This would require that we adopt Alan Williams’s definition of national cinema, which deems it a cinema contested by conflicting interest groups pertaining to one nation. As the reception of Hostage has shown, cultural artefacts can be potent sources of conflict between different opposing groups who claim ownership. Nonetheless, this definition does not account for the film’s transnational dimensions, which propose a much wider and more inclusive definition. The debate around Eduart’s nationality does however bring to the fore major anxieties around the ownership of media, beside the limiting imagination of national cinema. Williams’s definition does not force us to see Greek national cinema as being a Third Cinema confronting the power of Hollywood or as art cinema in the strict conceptualisation of European cinema as high-art. Instead, it frames national cinema as a cinema functioning outside Hollywood’s hegemony. A classification at this stage would need, in addition, to refer to conceptualisations of transnational cinema outside the popular/ art divide and a national cinema uninfluenced by globalisation and migrant flows. Rather than seeing the hybridity of a film like Eduart as vexing national cinema, we should think of it as ‘adding new discursive and aesthetic layers, which irrevocably change but also ultimately contribute to the continuing evolution of, national cultures’.44 Scholarly definitions of transnational films and filmmaking open the way to addressing a

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film according to questions of production, reception and distribution as much as focusing on the text itself. A film like Eduart emerges out of the in-between spaces of established national European cinemas, reflecting the director’s hybridity as he or she occupies a diasporic status as a filmmaker in Greece and Germany. It highlights the importance and limitations of classification overall: on the one hand, one cannot deny the certain value of a nationality and its implications of mobility, highlighting thus the role of Eduart as a vehicle of a contemporary Greek culture at home and abroad. On the other hand, classification may easily dissolve the more elusive features of the film and its affiliations to smaller Balkan nations like Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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Williams (2002), p. 5. Papanikolaou (2015), pp. 279–97. Naficy (2001), p. 10. Zoumpoulakis (2012). Hall (1990), p. 222. Ibid., p. 222. Kyriakos (2001), p. 120. Saklabanis, Leonidas (2010), ‘Konstantinos Giannaris: “i katastasi thymizi aparthaid”’ [‘Constantine Giannaris: “The situation is reminiscent of Apartheid”’], interview for Dromos tis Aristeras, 20 November. Available at https:// edromos.gr/%CE%BA%CF%89%CE%BD%CF%83%CF%84%CE% B1%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%BF%CF%82-%CE %B3%CE%B9%CE%AC%CE%BD%CE%BD%CE%B1%CF%81%C E%B7%CF%82-%CE%B7-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%AC% CF%83%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%83%CE%B7-%CE%B8/. Accessed 20 December 2019. Terzis (2011). Saklabanis (2010). Naficy (2001), p. 10. Arfaria (1999). From a personal interview with Giannaris in August 2011. His inspiration in particular came from Costas Gavras’s Mad City (1997), which tells of a media fiasco surrounding a disgruntled worker’s awkward attempt to take hostages at his former workplace. In this film, the alleged criminal, a foolish and innocent man left with no alternative, is demonised by the media, although he appears as the real hostage. Incidentally, like Giannaris, Gavras is also a diasporic filmmaker with a hyphenated identity and international acclaim.

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14. ‘29 Maiou 1999: I Ellada parakolouthi me kommeni tin anasa thn proti leoforeiopiratia. Ihe tragiki kataliksi’ [‘29 May 1999: Greece breathlessly witnesses the first bus-hijacking. It ended in tragedy’] in Cyprus Times 29 May 2018. Available at https://cyprustimes.com/29-ma-oy-1999-i-ellada-parakoloythei-mekommeni-tin-anasa-tin-1i-leoforeiopeirateia-eiche-tragiki-katalixi-video/. Accessed 21 April 2020. 15. Spirou (2011), p. 25. 16. Ibid., p. 36. 17. Papailias (2003), p. 1061. 18. Ibid., p. 1060. 19. Berlin (1990), p. 245. 20. Spirou (2011), p. 15. 21. Konstantinidou (2001), p. 125. 22. Spirou (2011), p. 44. 23. EU XXL Film Forum for European Film. Available at https://www. ambientartlab.at/exhibitions/night-of-european-film. Accessed 22 December 2019. 24. Celik (2015), p. 79. 25. Personal interview with Constantine Giannaris, August 2011. 26. Celik (2015), p. 79. 27. From the website of nationalist newspaper Ellinikes Grammes, article found online; their website is no longer available. 28. Zoumpoulakis (2012). 29. Personal interview with Kimon Tsakiris, August 2011. 30. Spirou (2011), p. 42. 31. Athens Indymedia online (https://athens.indymedia.org). Web page no longer available. 32. Papailias (2003), p. 1063. 33. Papadimitriou (2011), p. 507. 34. Iordanova (2003). 35. Venardou (2006). 36. ‘O Entouart thima tis grafiokratias’ [‘Eduart, a victim of bureaucracy’] in I Kathimerini 24 October 2006. Available at https://www.kathimerini. gr/266498/article/politismos/arxeio-politismoy/o-entoyart-8yma-thsgrafeiokratias. Accessed 20 December 2019. 37. The rules surrounding funding by the Greek Film Centre (GFC) are available at http://www.gfc.gr/images/files/kanonismos.pdf. Accessed 20 December 2019. 38. Eleftheriotis (2001), p. 32. 39. ‘O Entouart thima tis grafiokratias’ [‘Eduart, a victim of bureaucracy’] in I Kathimerini 24 October 2006. Available at https://www.kathimerini.gr/266498/ article/politismos/arxeio-politismoy/o-entoyart-8yma-ths-grafeiokratias. Accessed 20 December 2019. 40. Ibid.

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41. Bergan (2006). 42. Quoted from the previous Elevtheros Kosmos website, which is no longer online. 43. Elevtheros Kosmos online, web page no longer available. 44. Bergfelder (2005a), p. 321.

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C HA PT ER 3

En Route to Fortress Europe: Migration and Exilic Life in Roadblocks

Roadblocks (Ioannou 2000) features two parallel narratives connected to the profound experience of exile. Ayat crosses from Istanbul to Greece through the north-eastern borders in the Evros region to find his brother Ahmet, who fled Kurdistan eight months before, during the Iraqi war in 1998. In Athens, he discovers the whereabouts of the Kurdish mafia, who smuggle migrants through Albania to Italy. Ayat carries a photograph of Ahmet asking for any information but his desperate plea is met with indifference. Feeling discouraged, he manages to receive a place in a truck container at Piraeus port, headed for Italy. He is accompanied by Zirek Mizouri, who knew Ahmet. From the dark enclosure of the present, Zirek recounts his acquaintance with Ahmet and we observe the life of young male refugees from Iraqi Kurdistan on Koumoundourou Square in central Athens. Denied asylum and visa, they have set up makeshift tents at the square until they save enough to resume northward. Thirty minutes in, the film transforms from fictitious journey to Fortress Europe into documentation of lived experience, that of Kurdish refugees who occupied the square between 1998 and 1999. There, they join in treasured rituals of belonging, read letters from home and share their future hopes. Among the multitude, Ahmet is portrayed as a unit of the (re)imagined community. He aimlessly drifts at night while Zirek muses in the commentary over the despair that Kurds endure at home and in Greece. As layers of exilic life set in, Ahmet decides to flee to Italy despite obvious drawbacks. Back in the container, Ayat is told that his brother drowned. He and Zirek are apprehended by port authorities but escape. Left with no solution to their dead-end life, they set themselves on fire accompanied by a lament sung by a young Kurd in a separate shot and in an extreme close-up. Roadblocks is an exception in the wider corpus of films discussed here. Thanks to its particular brand of hybridity, Ioannou’s film defies genre classification or established categories of scholarly film analysis. Besides Eduart, it is the only one not to feature Greek, with Kurdish dialect spoken

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throughout the film. The cast is made up of amateur actors, actual refugees from Iraqi Kurdistan. The protagonist, Ahmet Guli, appears as himself beside his compatriots on the film’s main stage, Koumoundourou Square where Ioannou encountered 150 teenage refugees from Iraqi Kurdistan in their makeshift tents.1 More importantly, this is not a hegemonic film which rehashes the centrality (or marginality) of Greek identity amidst a migrant ‘invasion’. On the contrary, the notion of an encounter with the ‘Other’ is absent, while Athens is portrayed as a menacing and inhospitable place. Viewers are invited to experience the world from the point of view of its two exilic subjects, while Greek characters appear sporadically. More, the film projects a collective experience and perspective that mirrors the plight and dispersion of Kurds around the world. The Greek metropolitan city is thus envisioned as the locus of wandering strangers rather than a multicultural society of integrated ‘Others’ living beside indigenous populations. In this respect, the film’s mise-en-scène is governed by fragmentation, claustrophobia and a menacing atmosphere owing especially to the film’s exclusively nighttime setting. These structures generate panic and melancholy, owing to the permeating feelings of loss and longing. Although funded solely by the Greek Film Centre (GFC) and filmed on Greek territory, Roadblocks can be classified as an exilic film that incorporates in formal and thematic terms the claustrophobia and interstitiality that exilic and diasporic filmmakers invest in their films. In other words, there is little that makes Roadblocks, strictly speaking, a Greek film. Roadblocks is also a ‘journey of hope’ to Fortress Europe, one spurred by hopes lying ahead in the ‘Promised Land’. The journey ultimately brings migrants face-to-face with the hostility of Europe manifest in its intolerance and capitalist structures.2 Roadblocks, however, takes place for the greater part in the cityscape of Athens, from where the film’s refugees hope to be smuggled to northern Europe and Italy. In Athens, as the film’s title betrays, all roads are blocked. Mobility is thus hindered and aimless drifting at the square becomes a modus vivendi for Ahmet, while Ayat is consumed by claustrophobia. Here, the dark container emblematises the confining structures that undocumented migrants occupy in exile, whereas the open space of the square and urban landscape both signify loss and lack of direction rather than freedom. Roadblocks does have the formal qualities of exilic cinema and shares many features of contemporary migration cinema; yet in order to convey its challenging portrayal of life in exile, one would have to resort to a mixed approach that takes under consideration formal hybridity and the contours of migrant journeys in Fortress Europe. Documentary aesthetics pertaining to John Grierson’s famous description of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’, combined

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with a scripted story and dialogues inspired by the plight and journeys of the film’s amateur cast3 visualise a layered docudrama that merges lived experience and fictional accounts of exilic life. The director employs a mixed approach that involves conventional filmmaking methods and documentary modes, in particular the observational or fly-on-the-wall mode.4 This conscious choice ultimately puts into perspective the film’s claims to truth and its ethical premises on migrant representation, asking thus if realism and documentary amount to truth and what it means to give a voice to the subaltern through film. This chapter explores Roadblocks for its exciting formal qualities. I rely on Naficy’s exegesis to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the film’s complex depiction of exilic life. Instead of a prescriptive approach, I maintain a critical outlook taking into account the film’s power to confuse tightly knit categories, thus arguing that Ioannou reconstructs the imagined community and establishes layers of exile and longing that pertain to and transcend Naficy’s famous classification. For the Kurdish diaspora of Koumoundourou Square, belonging and identity are fragmented and simultaneously reconstructed through the collective experience of exile and longing. Particular focus will also be given to documentary aesthetics and to Ioannou’s interpretation of the docudrama as a form of storytelling and thematic framework. Lastly I will address the film’s closing sequence and discuss how self-immolation, as a defiant yet problematic response to the strictures Fortress Europe, links migrant agency with eruptive violence.

Contours of Exilic Life: Liminality, Homelessness, Espistolarity The opening sequence of Roadblocks introduces liminality and claustrophobia as the major features of the mise-en-scène commonly found in exilic films. At night, Ayat and a group of Kurds situated in the Evros region light a fire shortly before crossing the border to Greece. Ayat tells them how he has travelled from Kurdistan to find and retrieve his younger brother, who has likely made it to Italy. The darkness of the setting enhances the dread of illegal border-crossing.5 It also reminds viewers of the persecution of Kurds in Turkish Kurdistan while the scene’s limited visibility establishes clandestinity as a permanent modus vivendi. Contrary to the bulk of Greek migration films, in Roadblocks migration is a collective initiative which conveys the exodus and plight of a Kurdish diaspora in the making. The group put out the fire and venture into the dark. They need to be watchful of patrolling vehicles. Indeed, a military jeep approaches with a Turkish flag fluttering in the back, reminding

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Kurds of their illegal status in a country where they have been persecuted for decades. The group crouches behind tall bushes. Ayat asks the leader of the group ‘When will this damn road finally end?’, to which the latter responds ‘Don’t talk now. Shut your mouth’. Incidentally, Ayat is told to ‘shut up’ and ‘be quiet’ at several instances by Zirek. An extreme close-up on Ayat’s concerned face breaks up the body as though to indicate the fragmenting experience of illegal migration. From here on, Ayat will occupy liminal spaces, hiding, crouching and silent, in close-ups that exemplify the closed forms of exile. This brings to the fore the bodily functions that clandestine migration forces on the subject. The migrants reach the river where Ayat and two more paddle on an inflatable boat literally across to Greece while the title ‘Roadblocks’ appears, hinting at the dead end of migrant journeys. Several close-ups of the men treading through thick vegetation blur visibility and highlight claustrophobia. They climb over a fence seeking concealment. One man gives in to enthusiasm and runs, only to step on a mine and get blown to pieces. The scene suddenly shifts to a mise-en-scène characterised by panic, filmed with a shaking handheld camera and the sound of Ayat trampling over the thick vegetation. He finally reunites with the group in a truck headed to Athens. This opening sequence sets the tone for the rest of the film and especially for the mise-en-scène of the present timeline ridden with a sense of clandestinity, a state of in-between and transition. From here, an affective

Figure 3.1 ‘Don’t talk now. Shut up!’ Entrapment and clandestinity manifest in the back of a truck in Roadblocks (Ioannou 2000).

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narrative of longing and separation dominated by claustrophobia and liminality is put into motion. Longing and the pain of exile are intertwined with the present and past, and respectively with closed and open forms. Narrow framing, close-ups and entrapment, in contrast to wandering and openness, construct the collective experience of the Kurdish diaspora as one ruled by nomadism and longing, placement and displacement. The truck container and Koumoundourou Square both serve as non-places that highlight spatial inequalities and provide a commentary on the condition of Fortress Europe and its politics of exclusion. For Naficy, ‘each form has a spatial and a temporal dimension’. Closed form finds its direct application in the first timeline of Roadblocks: interior spaces that restrict movement, dark lighting and static framing. Here, panic and fear govern the existence of the two men, ‘while the plot centers on pursuit, entrapment, and escape’.6 In the container, placement is merely a marker of displacement. Entrapment in the present is determined by overall spatial distribution as the truck is stored in the hold of a ship among other container trucks. In several instances the narrative unexpectedly shifts from the open and brighter setting of the square to the truck from where Ayat peeps through a hole in the container’s canvas and sees port authorities capture and beat migrants hiding in other trucks. The narrative thus gains the status of a suspense film that comments further on the dead-end lives of the film’s characters. This sensation is brought to its inevitable climax at the shocking finale as exterior space becomes the site of self-immolation rather than freedom. On the other side of the spectrum, Ahmet’s life is governed by open structures which signify anything but freedom and mobility. Naficy sees in this a preference for continuity, introspection and retrospection that mobility and openness facilitate. Ahmet’s life, however, is governed by perpetual wandering and circularity, exemplifying the semantic universe of the term ‘roadblocks’: they constantly lead to the same realisation – that one way or another he must leave for Italy. Conclusively, despite formal and temporal differences, the impression is the same: there is no way out for Kurdish migrants. Ahmet is a lonely drifter, much like the characters Naficy detects in exilic and journey films. Ahmet goes on Deleuzian ‘bal(l)ades’, the term referring to Gilles Deleuze’s playful injection of the French term for a stroll (‘balade’) with a ballad (‘ballade’) to indicate a sorrowful kind of wandering that Deleuze identified as a decisive feature of post-war, modern cinema.7 According to Deleuze, an everyday kind of banality is played out in the empty spaces of postmodern alienation, which absorbs characters. One such space is the square and the urban landscape that Ahmet traverses – non-places invested with alienation and non-belonging. The transition from

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truck container to the square occurs twenty-four minutes into the film. On the voice-over, Zirek tells of his first encounter with Ahmet: ‘He had gone for a walk the night of New Year’s Eve feeling sad . . . very sad. His mind kept going to you [Ayat’s family]. He kept talking about the night your village was bombed.’ In the first shot, Ahmet is on Syntagma Square where the municipal orchestra performs Christmas carols. In 1998, Syntagma Square boasted the tallest Christmas tree in Europe.8 This was during the first years of the Simitis government which implemented neoliberal measures, ultimately paving the way for the country’s Eurozone membership in the 2000s. Ahmet is dwarfed against this vacant signifier of prosperity and grandeur. As he walks back to Koumoundourou Square, an establishing shot of the entire neighbourhood from up high is set against Zirek’s words: ‘He couldn’t take it anymore so he fled to Turkey and from there to Greece.’ The wide shot and panning movement demonstrating the square, a church and the busy streets, break with the closed form of the present but, nevertheless, Ahmet is consumed by the alienating urban landscape of Athens as the shot suggests. From the festivities and bright lights of Syntagma Square, we are transferred back to Koumoundourou Square. Two separate shots reveal the difference between the glamour of one square and the destitution and hostility of the other. A group of three men, in all likelihood Kurdish mafia, are beating a younger man. A cut to Ahmet looking in their direction suggests that he sees but cannot intervene in a violent event that is also part of the mundane everydayness of the square where the mafia exercises its power. At the time, the refugees had no access to toilets and would either go to a nearby hotel9 or simply do their toileting in the open. The square was heavily littered with trash, painting a very different picture from Syntagma Square.10 This is an obviously hostile and bleak environment, a non-place and marker of spatial inequalities in the heart of Athens that rings with the truth of documentary filmmaking. Ahmet meets Ali, who arrived a few days before. For him ‘it is good in Greece. In Turkey you have to stay hidden all the time’. His words do echo the persecution of Kurds in Turkey but, as we have seen by now, the Kurds in Greece are either stuck in a container or drifting on Koumoundourou Square; they too remain invisible, an issue that also resonates with the indifference of the public and Greek state to the refugees’ unhygienic and inhumane living conditions. Invisibility is shown as an all-encompassing feature of undocumented migrants in Fortress Europe. Beside the material waste, the refugees, who like modern-day nomads have set up makeshift tents on the square, are human waste and drifters without an itinerary or purpose. In the container, Ayat appears to have a purpose and itinerary which revolve around his mission – to restore family unity. He reveals the

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reason behind his journey and simultaneously the patriarchal structures of the Kurdish family during the opening sequence: as the oldest male and Ahmet’s sole sibling, the burden falls on him to find his brother. ‘That’s what the family decided’, he tells Zirek. As the film progresses though, separation and longing set in and Ayat’s agency becomes tragic. Agency itself, whether determined by enclosure or openness, is ultimately tragic. The placement and displacement the brothers endure is another indication of clandestinity as described in the voice-over where we hear Zirek speak, yet another invisible migrant: ‘We got used to living like animals. We travel illegally and die illegally as though it is something natural.’ The omniscient narrator of the film here is not one of the brothers or a neutral commentator, but another member of the diaspora and an exilic subject. With a non-diegetic commentary on the voice-over, Ioannou builds additional layers of enclosure and nostalgia which complete the portrait of the Kurdish diaspora in Greece. The deeper that nostalgia sets in, the more the epistolarity, the desire to bridge this gap, grows. This sense of longing is conveyed through any means possible – mise-en-scène, temporality and voice-over. In exilic films ‘spatial configuration is driven by structures of alienation but also by eruptions of nostalgia’.11 Nostalgia manifests in the brothers’ separation and Ayat’s desperate attempt to find Ahmet. As familial separation becomes increasingly pronounced among all the inhabitants of the square, the film transforms into a chronotope of exile and separation. Indeed, the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square express their longing for home, often through the narrator’s commentary. Alienation and longing are intricately linked to form. Over random shots of Ahmet wandering on the square, which indicate the randomness of his sense of place, Zirek ruminates on a collective nostalgia: ‘our hearts beat forever in Kurdistan, where our mothers and loved ones live, the people we have permanently parted from’. It is the two brothers, however, who are separated in and by space and time, in other words, who experience a permanent sense of loss.

An Exilic Docudrama: Realism and Formal Hybridity I have shown thus far how open and closed chronotopes signify loss and longing in Roadblocks. Placement and displacement function in tandem to signal separation between Ayat and Ahmet, the Kurdish diaspora and Kurdistan. The open structures of the square contrast with the claustrophobia of the container but as shown above, lack of direction and displacement negate agency and refute any notion of freedom, generating a different yet familiar impression of a dead end. For Naficy ‘openness is suggested by

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long shots, mobile framing, and long takes that situate the characters within their open settings, preserving their spatiotemporal integrity’.12 In other words, if Ayat’s experience of exile and displacement should, according to the canon, be conveyed through fragmentation, then Ahmet’s requires continuity, which would also correspond to the power of uninterrupted filming and documentary to truthfully convey actuality and lived experience. The latter has been famously discussed by Bazin in his celebration of Italian Neorealism as a form of ‘reconstituted reportage’, which lends a documentary quality particularly for its evocation of the mundane empty hours of everyday experience.13 If travelling shots are the main vehicle of (neo)realism and documentary effect, then what can be said of the sparse use of continuity in Roadblocks and simultaneously its recourse to documentary? This section will demonstrate how Roadblocks introduces hybridity by fusing the formal conventions of documentary, neorealism and accented cinema. The end result is a layered evocation of life in exile and a heartfelt tribute to the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square. Documentary and fiction merge, following the logic of a dramatised reenactment of actual events (docudrama) additionally allocated according to place: the journey to Athens and Ayat’s timeline in the container are both staged, whereas the mise-en-scène of Koumoundourou Square is the same scene of abandonment and sign of nomadic life that Athenians observed at the time. The ‘stage’ here has not been set by the director who had in fact to navigate his way through the various challenges that stemmed from Koumoundourou Square as a film set. Ioannou was confronted with several challenges such as the enormous amount of rubbish at the square, noise pollution and lack of lighting. The crew were not allowed to use projectors on the square so Ioannou had to utilise a digital camera and what little lighting existed.14 Moreover, Ioannou and his cast were at several instances confronted with the Kurdish mafia, who routinely threatened the young Kurds for participating in a film that exposed the mafia’s enduring grasp over the refugees. Ioannou claims that portions of the film were actually filmed against looming threats by the mafia who ‘owned’ the square and its clandestine economy, which was based on cigarette bootlegging. In order to classify the director, we need to take stock of his identity as an indigenous filmmaker, which automatically places him in a hegemonic position. He is readily available to speak on behalf of the ‘Other’, who is cut off from the means of enunciation (it is not coincidental that Kurdish resistance fighters resorted to hunger strikes and, less often, to self-immolation in public).15 Moreover, the film found its major sites of reception at thirty European film festivals16 and through small circuits

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of cinephiles and mainly film scholars. It is worth asking to what extent a film like Roadblocks reaches a diasporic and indeed Kurdish audience; it seems rather unlikely. Stavros Ioannou is an exilic filmmaker, if only in style. The dislocated mode of address, evident in the storyline and mise-en-scène, mirrors the experience of Kurdish exiles, not the director’s. At the same time, Ioannou employed artisanal, non-commercial and an overall accented mode of production which blurs the boundaries between hegemonic/indigenous and diasporic filmmakers. Arguably, Roadblocks could be included in an extended revision of Accented Cinema. The director’s formally layered and self-reflexive approach to exilic life and recourse to neorealism bring to the fore his links to Greece’s art cinema tradition. The blatant lack of cinematic gloss and the film’s obvious imperfections reflect the difficulties Ioannou was forced to cope with on the square, as mentioned above. The film gains its accent from the artisanal production modes that break from commercial production modes and national cinema, an issue that is palpable in the collective mode of address.17 In terms of production and filmic style, Ioannou is situated in an interstitial space where indigenous filmmakers encounter the hurdles that mirror the deterritorialisation and endless frustrations of migrants in the host society. Roadblocks internalises the conditions of its own production. Accent is obviously inscribed on the voice-over, which reflects Zirek’s ethnicity as migrant and amateur actor/film persona. The text of the voice-over introduces epistolarity, thus breaking from narrative systems of hegemonic and commercial films. Ioannou’s preoccupation with the individual and collective experience of exile and Kurdish migration make his film a broader allegory on the dead-end lives of migrants and especially refugees and asylum seekers. The aesthetics of experimentation and the imperfection of the film’s mise-en-scène, together with the artisanal and low-cost modes of production and collective address in the film, indicate the move from national cinema to an accented cinema that bears similarities to Third Cinema. Ioannou’s particular treatment of actuality instils meaning into the setting and its inhabitants beyond the framework of documentary and the erroneous term ‘reality’, which is inevitably influenced by expectations and ideological discourse. Instead of continuity, Ioannou introduces a sense of immediacy through fragmented cutting and close-ups. The handheld digital camera facilitates a sense of presence, of ‘being there’, and lends a grainy texture akin to the observational mode of documentary and news reportage. The only travelling shot in the entire film serves expressive aims rather than diegetic and conveys the same no-way-out impression as the closed

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form. The one-minute shot interrupts Ahmet’s aimless cycling at the square and bridges a sequence of urban wandering. Zirek’s commentary over two shots of Ahmet cycling adds layers of meaning and resonates as a poetic meditation on longing and exile: What a horrible dream . . . Europe. Another Kurdistan, small as the square. How is prison any different? A Kurd is a slave. Freedom . . . freedom for others. A Kurd is a Kurd.

The scene cuts to a shot of the tents from the road and resumes movement laterally, documenting the multitude of tents set up on the square’s periphery. Zirek elaborates over the scene: Everyone in the square . . . without homes, only tents. A village of tents. Without water, light or a bed. Every hour feels the same . . . empty. You want to live but can’t. You ask for help and they give you food. I don’t want food. I want freedom.

The mobile camera contrasts with the immobility of the square’s settlers and drives deeper the dystopia of displacement. This particular function of mise-en-scène is strategic in conveying immobility and deterritorialisation as a permanent ‘state of affairs’ that corresponds to lived experience. The camera’s peripheral placement accentuates the peripheral life of the Kurds, situated in the centre of Athens, yet marginal and invisible to the public. The camera moves on the road with the speed of a passerby driving past the scene, slow enough to catch a good glimpse before leaving the scene behind. The voice-over as well hints to public indifference and neglect (‘you ask for help and they give you food’). The commentary and tracking shot reveal the painful fact that for the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square, freedom is not a choice. The tracking shot documents a particular truth and state of affairs that pertains to actuality and lived experience – the dozens of makeshift tents set at Koumoundourou Square in 1998 by Kurdish refugees. Yet the shot per se can serve expressive purposes that pertain to exilic cinema and accented films overall. The film is embellished by such choices, transgressing the mandates of documentary filmmaking and the one-sided logic of media reports. Ioannou accentuates this by avoiding diegetic montage or camera movement, which serve here as the building blocks of a greater meditation on exilic life and especially the experience of the young male Kurds. The conventions of neorealism serve a major purpose. Indeed, the real settings, amateur cast, their nationality and use of Kurdish in addition to their personal experience of exile reflect a form

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of social and political emergency. There is a profound sense of awareness of social setting and human experience at play in the square, an awareness which resonates also in the dialogues between random characters, particularly since their discussion on the war at home and the reasons for their departure match a lived experience. In particular, the Kurds that Ioannou met and befriended were running not only from persecution and war but also from mandatory military service either in the Kurdish resistance or the Iraqi military. This is one of the major issues discussed on the square and which bonds the Kurds in exile. Together, they share their desire to live. The real setting, amateur cast and uneventfulness of life align the film with Bazin’s exegesis on Italian Neorealism as free of the constraints of plot. Roadblocks is replete with non-diegetic sequences which underscore the empty hours of life in exile, briefly evoked by Zirek in the commentary (‘every hour feels the same . . . empty’). According to Bazin, the absence of plot brings the humanity of characters to the fore: ‘[R]educed to their plots, they [Italian films] are often just moralising melodramas, but on the screen everybody in the film is overwhelmingly real. Nobody is reduced to the condition of an object or a symbol that would allow one to hate them in comfort without having first to leap the hurdle of their humanity.’18 Exilic narratives tend to focus less on plot and more on the ‘inscription of exilic displacement, split subjectivity and multifocalism’.19 To the latter one can include non-linearity and uneventfulness. Ioannou conveys the empty and repetitive modes of life on the square as defined by non-belonging and liminality. This focus on the empty hours establishes life in exile as a vicious cycle as though time stands still or moves in circles. For Deleuze, the non-linearity of time is an essential feature of neorealism and modern cinema overall. Wandering is expressed in the inscription of time felt and spent in contemplation. The Deleuzian bal(l)ade, exemplified in Ahmet’s mournful wandering, points to the postmodern notion of time as non-linear and uneventful rather than a vehicle of modernity and progress. Accompanied by Zirek’s poetic commentary, the ‘journey’ from Syntagma to Koumoundourou Square becomes a descent into the loneliness of nonbelonging. In the words of Edward Said, Ahmet’s sorrowful wandering manifests ‘the crippling sorrow of estrangement’ and an ‘essential sadness [that] can never be surmounted’.20 As a collective of individual drifters, the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square embody the failures of modernity and of the post-war dream. The documentary aspirations of neorealism, characterised by non-eventfulness and plot elimination, were imported by the filmmakers of New Greek Cinema, who aspired to appropriate European cinematic modernity and

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facilitate a national cinema in the tradition of Italian Neorealism. The particular stylistic qualities of Roadblocks may hark back to the Greek school of cinematic modernity, but Ioannou retreats from the mandates of national and European art cinema, proposing instead an aesthetic that pertains to accented cinema. He challenges totalities by reflecting the experience of liminality in formal and thematic terms. Roadblocks thus embodies shifting cinematic tendencies in Greece and Europe, of migration cinema as a vehicle of liminality and hybridity. The voice-over provides a literary quality and poetic gravitas and drives deeper epistolarity, forcing audiences to focus on the pain Kurds endure and, as Bazin points out, their humanity. This is arguably why, rather than tracking shots and continuity, Ioannou resorts to montage and especially multiple cuts to ‘empathic close-ups of the faces of the amateur actors who are “acting” their own characters’.21 One sequence in particular illustrates this tendency. Ahmet joins Ali and Abbas in their tent to discuss news from Kurdistan. The camera pans from a shot of the busy street to the tent where we see three men reclining. Cut to a close-up of Ahmet’s hands tearing a piece of bread. Cut back to a medium overhead shot behind Ahmet. A slight panning movement shows three men sitting ahead of Ahmet as he proceeds to recount his last days in Kurdistan: ‘I was summoned to serve in the military. I thought “no way am I going to the army”. I thought it over and presented myself. An officer told me “come again in three days”. Then I ran away and came over here.’ The shot lasts twentyfive seconds, long enough to convey the narrow and confining space. In keeping with a fragmented montage and uneven editing, the scene cuts to an extreme close-up of Abbas responding. He asks Ahmet about his future plans to which he responds, ‘This is Europe. Where else should I go? In Iraq there is war. If I find work I’ll do any job they give me.’ The camera cuts to a blurry shot of Ali’s hand holding a lit cigarette and pans upward to an extreme close-up of Ahmet’s profile which captures the tactility of his skin. The side of his face fills the entire frame, blurring the surrounding interior. Cut to a frontal close-up of Ahmet leaning his head, the light from an oil lamp illuminating his face. Cut to a close-up of Abbas approaching the lamp’s flame with a cigarette between his lips. Cut to hands tearing bread and again to an extreme close-up of Ali’s head moving within the frame, back to close-ups of Abbas, Ahmet and Ali again. Ahmet leaves before the scene cuts without any warning to the hold of the ship in the present. This two-minute discussion sequence features seventeen cuts in total and is filmed almost entirely in close-ups. Close-ups enhance proximity and magnify the subjects as though to extract their humanity and paint a

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fresco of Kurdish faces. This strategy is telling of documentary aesthetics in Roadblocks. As a docudrama, in which amateur actors act their own stories, there is a degree of self-consciousness around the notion of representation as opposed to presentation. Although the film is made on the premise of a ‘factual representation of actuality’ that succeeds in truthfulness,22 Roadblocks remains conscious as a mediated portrayal in which reality and lived experience are merged and, indeed, represented. Rather than a pure vehicle of truth and reality, Roadblocks pays homage to the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square. Empathic close-ups are one way of achieving this. Ioannou thus opposes the moral panic surrounding the ghettoisation of refugees which was growing in the period and instead projects the humanity and pride of Kurds who endure and carry on against growing oppression. This brings us to another major point which revolves around life at the square and how the refugees of Koumoundourou Square reappropriated public space, claiming their ‘right to the city’.23 By establishing a sense of home and belonging at the square, these young men also reestablished the imagined community.

Reclaiming the City, Reimagining the Community Life at Koumoundourou Square is defined by wandering, displacement and liminality. Nevertheless, beyond the contours of exilic life, the square transforms for a brief period into a home away from home. Treasured rituals of belonging, shared experience and a spirit of camaraderie and togetherness serve as the building blocks of the imagined community, reinstated against the patriarchal mandates of the Kurdish nation and Iraq which deem Kurdish male youth to be disposable soldiers. Paradoxically, the experience of displacement helps reconstitute the Kurdish nation in exile. Away from the geographical signifiers of Kurdistan and the Kurdish nation, the men inject new meaning into the Athenian city centre and reimagine the nation at an interstitial location where difference emerges. But difference here does not dissolve or remain in the margins of the host society according to the model of the multicultural European metropolis. Public space in the host society is reappropriated and essentially occupied by the newcomers, who insert their cultural identity into the host society and particularly into a designated public space of congregation. The square is a meeting point for Kurds and a place where they (re)build collective life. This is where Ayat seeks traces of his brother. It is also where Abbas had arrived at the square to discover with great joy that Ahmet, his ‘sinhorianos’, that is, someone from the same village, was there too. The Kurdish village is rebuilt on the square through collective life, ritual and shared experience.

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The men demand access to urban life, as if manifesting Lefebvre’s declaration about the ‘right to the city’. The right to the city is a common rather than an individual right that requires collective power and organisation in order to radically restructure the very processes of urbanisation.24 It is inextricably linked to the very idea of democracy and freedom of movement for all inhabitants of the city, beyond the mandates of citizenship and the commodification of neoliberal capitalism which accordingly allocates space and creates spatial inequalities. All this is not to say that the transformation of public space can yield a grand-scale transformation of public consciousness and the city itself. After all, the widespread rhetoric on the square as an unhygienic and inaccessible ghetto unmistakably demonstrates its inhabitants’ lack of interaction with the local community and the insurmountable obstacles facing a smooth coexistence. The Kurds of Koumoundourou Square lived literally on the square while locals overlooked them from their balconies in the surrounding tenement buildings. Thus, despite public visibility, the square is a deterritorialised space not unlike the old railway and bus stations, hotels and abandoned dilapidated buildings in the centre of Athens. Non-places have become, especially in the post-2008 period, the exclusive locale of marginal populations like drug addicts, the homeless and migrants. For the protagonists of Roadblocks and other migrants who have arrived without papers, the square is first and foremost a place of survival. With all escape routes blocked and without any legal documents or forms of interaction with the local community, the film’s Kurds merely exist on the square, surviving each day by making room for small yet significant habits and rituals of life and belonging. At squares and in surrounding detached spaces such as sidewalks, tenement building entrances and shop terraces, migrants create smaller enclaves of activity which they impregnate with their distinct cultural identity.25 The Kurds of Roadblocks achieve this in varying ways. During the day, they turn their heads to Mecca and pray while at night they set up makeshift tables and make tea, cook traditional dishes, share their tents, have conversations, read letters from home. A sense of hospitality is established in their new homes – the tents. In the earlier scene we can see how Ahmet is welcomed into Ali’s and Abbas’s tent: he removes his shoes, shares bread with them, and before leaving takes his shoes and puts them back on outside the tent. In an emotional and evocative sequence, Ahmet’s tent becomes the space where epistolarity emerges as a binding agent of Kurdish refugees. Ahmet, Abbas and Ali welcome Mizafer, an older refugee, who has some good news. He has received a letter from his family but cannot read or write. Ahmet looks at the letter and exclaims ‘I recognise

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these letters’ and kisses it. This very moment becomes a treasured ritual. It involves not only the receiver, Mizafer, but also the younger men. The warm dim lighting in the tent lends an almost mystical allure to the scene. Letters from home are a decisive feature of epistolarity. They simultaneously bridge the gap between loved ones and remind the receiver of the unbridgeable distance and searing pain of longing. Arguably, it is not coincidental that the scene follows shots of drifting on the square accompanied by Zirek’s painful realisation that ‘their mothers are the people they have parted with, possibly for good’. Besides bad news about conflicts in Kurdistan, the letter contains news about the engagement of Mizafer’s older brother. The men are shown again in empathic close-ups, smiling and rejoicing while Mizafer’s face lights up. This brief interlude is overwhelming in its sense of joy, which breaks with the dystopia and melancholy of exilic life and aimless wandering. It is an opportunity for celebration. They exit the tent and break into dance, singing traditional songs in a oneminute long take. Here, rather than a tracking shot, Ioannou follows the men’s circular movement and documents it in a single take to demonstrate how the dancing group grows as more men join in, holding hands. These activities and smaller gestures, such as preparing and conversing over tea contribute to reimagining a community based on fraternity and egalitarian values – here, the common experience of exile which eradicates all differences and binds men. Through these everyday practices, the migrants of Koumoundourou Square ‘reconfigure the meanings of

Figure 3.2 Ahmet kisses a letter from home in Roadblocks (Ioannou 2000).

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belonging against dominant spatializations’ and ‘practice citizenship across borders [. . .]. Among such multiple scales, [. . .] the neighbourhood [. . .] (re)emerges as an important reference in the everyday lives of very diverse urban populations, with meanings that extend far beyond its spatial determinants and invest it with a renewed importance, distanced from old identification with community and locality’.26 The refugees’ discussions around their fires about events at home and their past and future trajectories make Koumoundourou Square a realm of public debate, akin to the ancient agora. Here one man sets a small kitchen and cooks kebabs and traditional dishes, another has a tea stall, while Abbas has turned his tent into a barber shop where he gives free haircuts. The men share their meals in the tents and discuss news from home over a plate of food. These quotidian rituals of togetherness introduce cultural difference into the urban environment. At the same time, the square is a public realm of crucial decision-making, like Ahmet’s life-threatening departure to Italy in the winter. The Lefebvrian concept of the right to the city is useful since it reascribes membership and participation to inhabitance, in a process which Lefebrvre refers to as ‘habiter’ (to inhabit). It entails participation in the ordinary and extraordinary practices, the right to live in urban space as well as access to the production of and decisionmaking on urban space. Through their everyday life and rituals, the film’s refugees renegotiate belonging and citizenship, transforming thus public spaces into civic ones where communal activities link citizens and all inhabitants. Through their disenfranchisement and the prohibitions the Kurdish mafia imposes on them, the young Kurds articulate an urgent call for freedom that resonates with Zirek’s passionate plea mentioned earlier (‘I don’t want food. I want freedom’). Indeed, right after the brief celebration, a Greek courier delivering clothes arrives at the square looking bewildered. Tensions mount as an eager crowd tries to get hold of the parcel. Ahmet argues that those without enough clothes should have priority. One Kurdish man shouts angrily, ‘Get out of here. These clothes are not for you.’ The courier leaves in anger and the crowd breaks apart after snatching a few items. Ahmet exclaims ‘in the end the mobsters get them’. Mafia are shown dwelling in bars and billiard clubs in surrounding areas. When Ayat finds the man in charge of smuggling migrants, nicknamed ‘Crazy’, he is well-dressed and playing billiards. The club appears as a popular venue for the Kurdish mafia, and is moreover governed by them, as ‘Crazy’ orders his thugs to throw Ayat out. Thus financial capital and power deem the square a locale of poor refugees and newcomers without papers, all in need of the knowledge and connections of the smugglers, who are allocated to more privileged sites.

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The interplay between disenfranchisement and public displays of belonging underscore the antagonisms that determine life in exile and magnify the undying desire for freedom. Despite everything, the Kurds persist and instead of demonstrating victimhood, claim their right to urban life and freedom. It is a sign of pride which has prefigured Kurdish identity and derives from geopolitical discourse on the mountains of Kurdistan as signs of unyielding (male) strength, a myth common among persecuted people.27 Kinship and moral values linked to home, place and family keep this community tightly knit, especially in exile, where the need to belong becomes pronounced in individuals and collective formations. During New Year’s Eve of 1998, the leftist party Synaspismos, which had its central offices near the square, organised a night of live music for the Kurds at the square. Ioannou captures the event and ensuing festive spirit. A three-minute montage sequence demonstrates the dancing crowd and smaller enclaves of dancing groups that transformed the square from a so-called ‘ghetto’ of destitution and displacement into a place of celebration. Here, one can distinguish a combination of establishing shots, extreme close-ups and movement within and outside the frame, panning motion and zooming in and out of the camera. In keeping with formal hybridity, Ioannou documents the actual fete and embodies festive joy in the scene’s stylistic features. One man in particular seems to draw the camera’s attention. The camera cuts from a medium shot of several men holding and waving their arms to a close-up of the man performing a solo dance in the middle of another circular group holding hands. He is waving a green bandana and puffing out his chest, smiling extravagantly. Cut back to the previous group and cut again to a close-up of the man’s hands waving the bandana. The camera pans backwards to show him turning and passionately gesticulating while another man joins in from the frame’s left corner, waving a red bandana. Cut to an establishing shot of the massive crowd in front of the stage and back again to the first group, which has grown in size, and finally to the second group led by the solo dancer’s exuberant movements. The camera moves from the ground showing his entire stature before zooming out to show another dancer following suit behind waving a white cloth. By this point, the camera has joined the growing circle of dancers and moves among and through them following the circular direction of the dance and lateral movement of grasped hands in motion. An extreme close-up on the man with the green bandana magnifies his smile and features as though to convey the sheer bliss of the moment. In keeping with the neorealist canon, the film’s plot and temporalities have room for a wide spectrum of episodes and emotions pertaining to the

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unpredictability of life itself and the vicissitudes of exilic life in particular. As the celebration continues, the mood shifts suddenly as Ahmet and his comrades retreat to a tent to discuss the journey to Italy. Joy quickly gives way to suspense as Ahmet prefers to depart in the winter while the others will wait until spring, afraid of the volatile weather and the Mediterranean Sea during the colder months. The celebration on the square is the last sequence to break with the pervading dystopia and to showcase the transformative impact of the Kurds on the urban environment. The harsh winter sets in as the following sequences, leading to the tragic finale, see the tents flooded after days of torrential rainfall. Life at the square becomes increasingly burdened, leading to Ahmet’s departure, which signals death as the ultimate marker of life in exile.

Protesting Fortress Europe The closing sequence of Roadblocks brings both brothers’ journeys to a tragic conclusion that sets deeper the distance between them and their homeland. Returning to the beginning, we see how the film is bookended by clandestine journeys and twin deaths, asserting thus invisibility as an essential feature of migrant temporality – in life and in death. Following the painful discovery of Ahmet’s drowning, Ayat jumps out of the truck, bangs his head against the wall to the accompanying soundtrack of a Kurdish lament sung by another young Kurd in an extreme close-up. The song’s lyrics and evocative vocals transform both protagonists’ temporality, and that of all Kurdish ‘sons’, to a mourning song involving a mother and her sons: Son: I am dying to see you again my homeland. My soul bleeds. I have only you on my mind. Anything you ask for I will do, Kurdistan my homeland. You are beautiful like a spring garden so why do you make my heart bleed? My poor wretched mother, the sun has died, the light is gone and darkness has covered our orange trees. Mother: My restless child, I cry for my unlucky sons. It kills me to know you are unhappy. Oh my crazy child, I will die for your woe.

Mother as nation, nurturer and homeland is entirely absent, making the lyrical epistle a signifier of disconnection. Ioannou looks again at the significance of loss and longing in nationalist discourse for Kurds at home and abroad, a nation born in conflict that saw its male youth depart en masse to Europe. Moreover though, the persecution of Kurds and struggle for liberation distinguish the Kurdish case and respective cinematic renditions of exilic life. Postcolonial liberation struggles have figured

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Figure 3.3 An ‘empathic close-up’ of a Kurdish mourner in Roadblocks (Ioannou 2001).

strongly in nation-building discourses that have in turn shaped Kurdish diasporic identity. The struggles of Kurds at home and abroad put into perspective the shocking ending of Roadblocks. For Kurdish migrants and freedom fighters in exile, self-immolation, alongside hunger strikes, often served as a powerful means to protest Fortress Europe and especially the incarceration of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the militant resistance group PKK, by the Turkish state. These forms of public protest force the host nation’s attention towards the Kurdish cause. In media reports migrants become linked to catastrophe and tragedy, and portrayed as importing a threat to security and European civilisation from impoverished sending nations and warzones. According to Celik, ethnic and racial difference in the contemporary media landscape of Europe is expressed all too often at the backdrop of a temporality of crisis involving eruptive violence and injury. Migrants are thus imagined as either the perpetrators or the victims of violence, in any case linked to a state of permanent crisis that preserves their outsider status. Migration cinema has been essential in articulating the victimhood of migrants and minorities as a way of showcasing popular anxieties over demography and identity in the new Europe. For Celik ‘the lives and experiences of ethnic and racial Others of Europe are marginalised into extreme temporalities defined by rupture, crisis and emergency. This urgency at the heart of Europe calls for immediate action against violence and violation and leaves no time for reflection’.28 Selfimmolation in Roadblocks is a climactic event, punctuated by the lament’s

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lyrics and the suspense introduced by parallel editing. As the montage gains a faster pace, alternating between Ayat and Zirek frantically running and the mourner, now profusely sobbing, the scene turns suddenly into a thrilling chase and emotional drama. Genre conventions momentarily suspend disbelief, forcing an emotional response on the part of the viewer, who is now directly immersed in the tense narrative and arguably influenced by the scene’s affective economy. The explosive violence of self-immolation, convincingly filmed through documentary technique, is indeed thrilling to witness without the risk or fear that public displays of violence pose. Remaining faithful to documentary, Ioannou films the scene with a handheld digital camera from a distance, making the viewer an onlooker of self-sacrifice. Distance and the grainy texture of the film enhance the documentary effect. The shaky frame amplifies the miseen-scène of dread and panic already established by the minor-key soundtrack and the night setting. Dread and panic describe Ayat’s temporality and culminate in a fire that consumes him. In the frame, two indiscernible dark figures douse each other in gasoline. Cut to an extreme close-up of the mourner and back to a medium shot of the men. One of them runs back with a lighter, bends down and immediately lights up as the second man jumps into the fire before they become engulfed in the flames in slow motion. The frame freezes as a message appears on the screen in the form of an epilogue to a letter: ‘With fire, the roads open up. From my heart I bid you farewell. Zirek.’ Ioannou pays tribute to the Kurdish struggle by depicting a powerful act of defiance associated with the plight and pride of Kurds, as shown in the closing dialogue after the pair ward off their captors and bolt: Zirek: What bloody road is this? I tried four times to escape but nothing . . . blocked roads [‘kleistoi dromoi’ – the film’s title]. Ayat: Me too . . . I am never going back to Kurdistan.

The ‘blocked road’ has a double significance. On the one hand, Ayat decides never to return to Kurdistan and on the other hand, he would rather sacrifice himself than become a refugee. Ayat and Zirek take their destiny into their own hands but the manner of their rebellion is questionable since their protest against the blocked roads of exilic life is suicidal. Migrant agency thus remains ‘within the realm of self-destruction’.29 As a shocking form of annihilation, rather than a painless and private form of suicide, self-immolation can potentially put the host nation to shame and provoke collective guilt and pity, but the extent to which it can instigate genuine political action against oppression is questionable. To comprehend its meaning and convey any potential impact it may have in mediatised

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representations, one has to capture migrant-related violence within its historical context so as to gain a holistic understanding of the deeper reasons underlying self-sacrifice and public protest without reducing migrants to victims and the event itself purely to the elements of shock that leave no room for reflection. Put differently, migrant-related violence needs to be investigated ‘as part of an interconnected environment, emerging out of rival forces in tension with each other [ . . . ]’.30 To fully comprehend the historicity and sociopolitical implications of self-immolation we would first need to grasp the extent of systemic violence, which typically remains invisible, hence why dominant definitions of violence involving corporeal injury are given more attention in public discourse and space on media reports.31 As I have argued though, Roadblocks is an accented docudrama seemingly commissioned to truthfully portray exilic life and animate the longing of Kurds in Athens. Rather than a rounded study of Fortress Europe and the multiplication of borders in Greece and post-Schengen Europe, Roadblocks functions as a poetic meditation on the condition of exile and a tribute to the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square. In other words, Ioannou fails to grasp the true extent of systemic violence, resorting instead to an apolitical evocation of epistolarity. Self-immolation thus occurs as a sudden shock and breaks with the film’s semantic universe, especially since lack of psychological depth obscures the motivations behind the self-immolation. Indeed, Ayat and Zirek are not freedom fighters, while the protagonists of Koumoundourou Square left Kurdistan in the first place to escape mandatory military service either in the Iraqi forces or the Kurdish resistance. During a heated discussion on the square, one man shares his desire to live and survive rather than join any military effort. The youth of Koumoundourou Square contradict patriarchal discourses of belonging which deem Kurds to be soldiers or bodies of protest. Abbas, for instance, displays a passion for life and indifference to Islamic tradition, appearing thus liberated from the constraints of the homeland and family. He enjoys eating pork and drinking beer since ‘Allah says everything is bad but here is Europe and I want beer’. In addition, such shocking forms of protests are always directed toward specific receivers and political establishments. In the film, however, these establishments and the demands of protestors don’t appear to concern the director. Self-immolation thus functions not so much as a last resort or a politically motivated protest against the forces that erect barriers but simply as dramatic effect intended to raise audience affect. By shocking audiences, Ioannou hopes to move them out of their comfort zone in the hope of cultivating solidarity. Yet, by obliterating as it does the subjects of protest, their motivations and agency are cut off and the event resonates merely with the overwhelming tragedy of the Guli brothers and

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the pathos of exile inscribed in the final farewell message. What are the contextual reasons behind self-inflicted violence in Roadblocks? Seen possibly as a cry for help, the act of self-sacrifice resonates as a numbing yet mute call that occurs outside the sphere of a politically charged struggle. In her critique of migrant suicide in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), Celik argues that the violent and shocking suicide of Majid provokes collective guilt but the meaning of the act itself is closed off to audiences.32 As a means of provocation, suicide is an attack against bourgeois complacency and simultaneously a popular convention of art-house cinema ‘a convenient way to fulfil the expectations of the art-house audience that is ready to be provoked by an art film’. This I argue applies to the ending of Roadblocks, particularly in the use of slow motion, the framing of the fire that seems to engulf the dark colour schemes of the ominous setting and, lastly, the epistle that adds layers of poetic gravitas beside the mournful soundtrack. These elements essentially blind audiences to the complex set of motivations and expectations in real-life cases of self-immolation that are directed and staged in the daytime, without the ominous effect of the night or the evocative staging of cinema. The potential of the sacrifice in Roadblocks to protest Fortress Europe and engage audiences in a political struggle is lost precisely because of the artistic and affective elements of the scene that convey it as a profoundly poetic and tragic moment. By mentioning the film’s title after yet another failed attempt to escape, Zirek conveys the scope of desperation, making self-immolation not only a last resort but also a profound act of defiance, projecting the weight and determination underlying his sacrifice onto the audiences who survive him. One might ask at this point if the fire indeed ‘opens up the road’ or if it consumes the migrant ‘Other’, leaving little beyond guilt and pity for audiences. Their sacrifice pays homage to Jihad Sieko who set himself on fire in front of the French embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus,33 to Berjin, a female guerrilla and member of the PKK, who set herself on fire in front of the Greek embassy in Copenhagen protesting the country’s contribution to Öcalan’s arrest. In Turkish Kurdistan imprisoned female guerrillas would most often take their lives in such a profound way to protest imprisonment conditions or removal of their freedom by patriarchal Kurdish tradition,34 indicating thus the sociopolitical roots of protest and self-immolation as an ultimate form of emancipated agency. In Ioannou’s film, the men indeed assume agency by taking their own life but the act itself occurs ‘outside the flow of history, outside the geography of power relationships and its political necessities’35 and outside the actions of partisan and activist groups like the PKK. The martyrdom of PKK

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fighters either in the warzones of Kurdistan or in Europe are meant to draw attention to a collective cause, involving most often Öcalan’s unjust incarceration and national self-determination for Kurds in the region known as Kurdistan. The martyrdom of Ayat and Zirek though turns them into victims of Fortress Europe whose agency is neither emancipatory nor pertaining to a collective struggle. It is merely the hallmark of tragedy, expressed with pride and defiance but nevertheless, tragic and disconnected from the collectivity of the diaspora. Alex Lykidis asserts that their sudden deaths ‘feel inexorable, so that we seem to have reached a point at which representation itself breaks down’.36 The fate of those who do, however, manage to penetrate Fortress Europe lies outside the film’s purview. Ayat and Zirek may have taken their own lives on screen but the actors did fulfil their hopes of reaching Europe as they made it to Italy, Germany and Holland.37 In fact Hussein Abdullah (Ayat) attended the film’s screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2001 together with Ioannou.38 It is thus worth asking how documentary realism can adequately portray and do justice to the stories of migrants like Ayat, Ahmet and Abbas and if it is the appropriate form of representation.

Notes 1. Personal interview with Stavros Ioannou, September 2018. In our conversation, Ioannou mentioned the popular term borrowed from Turkish ‘tsantiria’, which means a makeshift and temporary tent used by gypsies and nomads. 2. Loshitzky (2010), pp. 14–17. 3. Personal interview with Stavros Ioannou. 4. Nichols (2001), pp. 109–15. 5. In my conversations with Stavros Ioannou, the director admits that filming exclusively at night was a conscious choice: ‘The night conveys a kind of menacing sensation.’ Moreover, he chose to avoid the day because the accumulated waste at the Square was ‘more visible than even the people were’. 6. Naficy (2001), p. 153. 7. Deleuze [1985] (2005), p. 13. 8. Paradeisi (2006), p. 63. 9. When Abbas, one of the refugees, is asked where the men can wash up after he has given them haircuts, he suggests going to the Olympus Hotel where for 500 drachmas ‘you can have a warm shower’. 10. Announcement by the press department of the radical leftist party Synaspismos on the Kurds of Koumoundourou Square. Available at http://www .syn.gr/gr/keimeno.php?id=3542. Accessed 28 March 2019. See also Ta Nea 4 February 1999, online at https://www.tanea.gr/1999/02/04/greece/stomiden-i-antoxi-katoikwn-koyrdwn/. Accessed 2 April 2019.

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102 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Naficy (2001), p. 155. Ibid., p. 153. Bazin [1971] (2005), p. 20. Stavros Ioannou on Roadblocks. Available at www.cinephilia.gr/index.php/ tainies/hellas/1530-kleistoi-dromoi#. Accessed 11 December 2019. A 1998 report in To Vima expresses solidarity with Kurdish freedom fighters demanding Turkish authorities release Abdullah Öcalan. According to the author, ‘at Koumoundourou Square, the people search for work and for some hope for their future. At Klavthmonos Square, the hunger strikers demand the release of Abdullah Öcalan [. . .]. Hunger strikes and incidents of selfimmolation that shocked the public recently are the only weapons of a people threatened from every direction’. 13 December. Available at https://www. tovima.gr/2008/11/24/culture/oi-metanastes-tis-plateias-koymoyndoyroy/. Accessed 3 March 2019. Roadblocks was shown in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival in February 2001. Like its sibling film, Eduart, Roadblocks also faced similar issues with nationality and the national certificate required by the Greek Film Centre. Bazin [1971] (2005), p. 21. Naficy (2001), p. 103. Said (2012), p. 357. Paradeisi (2006), p. 63. Smith and Rock (2014), p. 58. Lefebvre (1996). Harvey (2008), p. 23. Papatzani (2015), pp. 359–60. Kalandides and Vaiou (2012) pp. 254–5. O’Shea (2004), p. 5. Celik (2015), p. 3. Ibid., p. 101. Chouliaraki (2008), p. 150. Žižek (2007). Celik (2015), p. 69. Cyprus News Agency, 11 December 1998. Available at http://www.hri.org/ news/cyprus/kyptypgr/1998/98–12–11.kyptypgr.html. Accessed 9 April 2019. Grojean (2012), p. 161. Chouliaraki (2008), p. 129. Lykidis (2009), p. 38. ‘Kleistoi Dromoi’ [‘Roadblocks’] on Cinephilia.gr. Available at http://www .cinephilia.gr/index.php/tainies/hellas/1530-kleistoi-dromoi. Accessed 22 December 2019. Personal interview with Stavros Ioannou, September 2018.

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C HA PT ER 4

Tragic Pathos and Border Syndrome: Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage

We did not cross the border. The border crossed us. (Latino saying)

Hostage (Giannaris 2005) is a watershed moment in contemporary Greek film history. The abundance of bibliography on the film is telling of this as very few Greek films attracted scholarly attention before the boom of Dogtooth in 2009, with the exception of Angelopoulos’s art-house cinema. Greek and international scholars have praised Giannaris for his bravery, since Hostage is the first Greek film to privilege the point of view of an Albanian immigrant and criminal in an effort to highlight institutional forms of violence that force immigrants into criminality. Giannaris negates the myth of Albanian criminality and opens our view to more insidious forms of violence that determine migrant identities in both host and sending nations. What’s more, Giannaris puts into operation his fictional account of the 1999 Flamur Pisli bus hijacking through a familiar Greek medium, a tragedy inspired by Sophocles’s Ajax. Only here, the noble hero is an Albanian immigrant. This is no small achievement. Released just six years after the hijacking, Giannaris’s film demanded a great deal from Greek audiences, as they were asked to recall and rethink the event from a radical perspective: to question the approach of the mainstream media and to take into account the roles of the police and Greek state in encouraging migrant criminality. In addition, the film demands that audiences reconsider the image of the Albanian immigrant as criminal, an otherwise acceptable and widespread belief in Greece that the media reinforced in their biased account of the hijacking. Giannaris reconstructs the mediatised event from the interior of the bus, prioritising the experience of the hijacker and hostages. The film’s title is telling, since in singular form it implies that the film’s eponymous hostage does not refer to the Greek passengers, but the hijacker, renamed here Elion Senja. Prioritising the underrepresented point of view of the Albanian migrant, Giannaris confronts that which is overrepresented in the media and gives

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his protagonist the power to articulate his plight and deeper motivation. The film’s opening disclaimer may seem to imply that Giannaris relies on poetic licence, but the film is in fact a truthful account of the event, informed by interviews of the hostages and research on preceding events and information surrounding Pisli’s residence in Greece and Albania. By delving deeper into the event, Giannaris compensates for what the media neglected in their one-sided reportage. Hostage needs to be examined in connection with the backdrop of the 1999 hijacking and its treatment by the media. As the focus in this section is, however, more on form, I will primarily address the film’s layered approach to border-crossing and mobility which reinforces its appeal to tragedy, as stasis transforms mobility into inertia and Elion is portrayed as a Sisyphean hero caught within the vicious cycle of immigration and emigration. In particular, emigration and immigration are conceived in a circular pattern, with Elion as a border subject1 caught between interstitial spaces: the Greek–Albanian border, detention centres and primarily in the bus. In this respect, Hostage depicts a journey of hope in which movement is paradoxically governed by a growing sense of claustrophobia which transforms the journey into tragedy. Loshitzky’s term, inspired by the eponymous film, is a reminder that the journey is spurred by hopes lying ahead (the migrant imagination) but the encounter with Fortress Europe turns hope into despair. As Loshitzky reminds us, these journeys, to the host nation or back home, often turn ‘into journeys of death’.2 In Hostage, immigration is instigated by financial motives while emigration gains momentum through the tragic hero’s quest for vindication. Elion’s journey to Greece, shown in scattered flashbacks that evoke his fragmented psyche, unfolds parallel to the journey of emigration during which Elion appears trapped in the bus. Seen in the present in the claustrophobic interior and simultaneously crossing the border to Greece in his traumatic memories, Elion is the ultimate border subject. To further comprehend this feature of the film, I return to Naficy’s meditation on claustrophobia embellished here by Gazmend Kapllani’s emotive account of his journey from Albania to Greece in A Short Border Handbook.3 Kapllani coins the term ‘border syndrome’ to illustrate the traumatising experience of border-crossing, particularly for Albanians who would repeatedly cross the border to Greece. Border syndrome functions as a literary metaphor which the author further refers to as an unclassified mental disorder and ‘obscure illness’,4 allowing him to allegorise the magnitude of the migrant’s psychic trauma. With a focus on mise-en-scène, Naficy illustrates a set of conventions that exilic filmmakers have established to evoke the journey’s trajectory and its shattering conclusion upon the

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suffering body and psyche of migrants. While Naficy’s concept of ‘embodied protest’5 is the result of academic scrutiny applied to film studies, Kapllani evokes the psyche of migrants with his literary prose. Ultimately though, both authors capture what crossing borders as an ‘illegal’ migrant entails, and examine how this experience can be conjured in the imagination and on screen. More, their accounts outline the consequences of other forms of violence, namely social (discrimination), political (random ID checks and police brutality) and economic (exploitation at the work place), for migrants who internalise the trauma of border-crossing. In the following paragraphs, I explore the two authors’ meditations on exile and the impact of border-crossing as they apply to Giannaris’s portrayal of Elion Senja. I take into account issues of mobility and agency in order to comprehend and convey the film’s layered approach to border-crossing and I argue that cinematic mobility, in and out of the frame, enhances the image of Elion as a tragic outsider bereft of agency. The film’s reliance on the tragedy that befalls migrants in journeys of hope reinforces discourses of victimhood which are inextricably linked to the long-standing image of Europe as an impenetrable Eldorado which migrants are doomed to perpetually orbit. Border syndrome and ‘embodied protest’ are useful tools in this respect which nevertheless reinforce the problem at hand as they illustrate, without critical zeal, bodily suffering and marginality as sole alternatives to life in exile.

Border Syndrome and Embodied Protest For Naficy and Kapllani, exile is a painful rift between the migrant’s homeland and their new alienating surroundings. Above all, it is a rift in that person’s psyche. In exilic films and the cinema of host nations, border-crossing involves the loss of identity as the migrant is forced into illegality and anonymity. Illegality works in tandem with discourses of criminality which deem migrants a threat to host societies. This particular social status transforms cultural difference into otherness and the individual into a precarious border subject, entirely excluded from public space and view, an individual without a sense of belonging in the host nation’s social strata. As a result, border syndrome sets in. According to Kapllani, border syndrome is ‘contracted’ at the actual border and entails ‘rejection at a border’.6 Border syndrome develops through encounters with borders that are ubiquitous in the host society – detention centres, Black Marias, police raids and the fear and loathing of indigenous people. The violent encounter impacts the migrant’s mind and sets the conditions for border syndrome. Similarly to psychosomatic

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disorders, the body becomes the site for the emotional pain of exile. The notion of a painful embodied experience inspires Kapllani and Naficy to think of the exilic subject as an ailing person, mentally and physically. The discourse of geographical borders was not entirely new to Albanian migrants since they were already familiar with ‘the borders of totalitarianism’7 which made escape punishable by death in Hoxha’s Albania. Kapllani recalls that it was a profound state of isolation in Communist Albania that shaped the migrant imagination and fuelled their anticipation of a capitalist El Dorado in Greece. According to him, Greece was referred to as ‘the-world-beyond-the-borders [. . .] a separate planet’.8 ‘You created in your mind a world of harmony and beauty, and with this construct in your head, you crossed the borders.’9 Border syndrome is then symptomatic of the migrant’s deluded imagination as the encounter with the host society, contrary to expectation, transforms hope into dystopia. Failure is therefore an essential cause of border syndrome and highlights victimhood as a salient feature of the migrant experience: ‘if he doesn’t make [a success of life abroad], he will be left hanging, at odds with the world and with the universe’.10 Kapllani argues that the migrant develops a ‘neurosis’ since he is ‘between eternal flight and eternal return’ always en route, longing for home and thus ‘full of contradictions’.11 Migrants are always in transition and, as mobility transforms into inertia, they are caught in transitory vehicles and locations – bus and train stations, airports, boats, trucks and abandoned reservoirs – non-spaces devoid of identity ‘where individuals function as passengers or customers [. . .] immersing themselves in the chance anonymity of a space without history, as if trapped and frozen in a time unmarked by events happening in the present’.12 Indeed, contrary to the sense of freedom and elation ushered in by the European road movie during the post-Cold War era, exilic films and films of the host nation associate cross-border mobility with claustrophobia rather than free movement. Naficy conversely refers to existing diagnoses of mental disorders in women13 and parallels their experience to the migrant’s plight. As he puts it, in exilic films the migrant performs14 an ‘embodied protest’ that reflects the director’s painful displacement in a hostile society. This pain manifests in a behaviour that is symptomatic of agoraphobia and anorexia which see sufferers voluntarily confined to the space they occupy, avoid the public eye, adopting disordered patterns of behaviour that impact heavily on the mind and body. Most importantly, this is done voluntarily. ‘[W]omen and exiles may willingly whittle down the space they occupy in order to fit the normalizing gaze of society about gender, sexuality, and citizenship ideals’.15 By doing so, they ‘behave themselves’ so as to be accepted by a society functioning on strict divisions of power

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and belonging. Kapllani articulates a similar notion when he declares that ‘as a migrant [. . .], your first instinct is to stay silent’. A migrant ‘digests his experiences in isolation’.16 In this respect, bodies are imagined as vessels of silent voices and often shown in submissive postures. A major side-effect of this ‘illness’ is that exilic individuals confuse voluntary confinement and silence as liberating and start to show symptoms of claustrophobia since the space of protest becomes a trap with no escape. Paradoxically, especially for agoraphobics, this space is felt as a safe haven and thus continued restriction becomes life-affirming and more successful dieting a source of motivation for anorexia sufferers. Similarly, migrants ‘behave themselves’, ‘stay silent’ ‘in isolation’, to conform to the expectations of the host society. And yet this process works at their own expense: ‘Anorexia, hysteria and agoraphobia may provide a paradigm of one way in which potential resistance is not merely undercut but utilised in the maintenance and reproduction of existing power relations.’17 In other words, the dominant ideology functions on the premise of voluntary victimisation or, according to Naficy, ‘overcompensation’,18 which implies a vicious cycle in which the sufferer/migrant continuously occupies non-spaces with growing efficiency. According to Naficy, migrants consequently develop persecution mania.19 Interestingly though, this paranoia is not entirely misplaced since ‘the migrant is a creature surrounded by borders’20 and, as filmmakers commonly showcase, border authorities, police and nationalists lurk in every corner – all intimations of violence. The migrant thus finds himself in a state of permanent crisis, a common notion in media discourse which casts migrants and refugees either as perpetrators or targets of violence. Arguably, one can wonder whether the migrant ‘Other’ can be imagined as a healthy individual when in the quest for a better life, pain and suffering are presented as the sole options. Embodied protest serves the logic of a morality tale in which there are perpetrators and victims of violence and discrimination. It therefore works in condemning the host society for its ill-treatment of migrants while simultaneously articulating an ‘unconscious, inchoate, and counterproductive protest without an effective language, voice or politics’.21 In their analyses, Naficy and Kapllani allude to psychiatric diagnoses and language (‘eating disorders’ and ‘syndrome’ respectively), which brings great bias. One must maintain a critical stance when reframing film genre in regard to the particular labels used in medicine which very often place a political roof over patients, transforming them into border subjects that require ‘special’ treatment which de facto requires containment. Through flashbacks, Giannaris acknowledges the proliferation of borders in contemporary Greece and their heterogenisation as geopolitical borders transform the migrant into a border syndrome sufferer, echoing

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this chapter’s opening epigraph. Analysis of the film therefore must be done with an awareness of this multiplication of borders and the violence that are essential to their articulation. After all, as Étienne Balibar affirms on the nature of borders, ‘their multiplicity, their hypothetical and fictive nature does not make them any less real’. 22

Vindication in Perpetual Dialogue with a Traumatic Past and the Migrant Imagination The film’s various flashbacks interrupt the linear journey from Thessaloniki to Albania, regressing to unspecified moments of Elion’s second residence in Greece and the transitional time in Albania before his second flight. In scattered instances, the film’s montage evokes Elion’s fragmented psyche, revealing the actions and initiatives that led to the hijacking, such as illegal arms deals with the local police chief of the village of Kato Scholari, Elion’s sexual encounter with the former’s wife and his humiliation in Greece and Albania. Giannaris thus reveals the impact of GrecoAlbanian nationalism on Elion and uncovers the deeper motives behind his flight and criminal behaviour. The flashbacks essentially underline Elion’s non-belonging in Greece as an Albanian criminal and in Albania as an unworthy man. Flashbacks are a unique tool which in cinema has the potential to uncover truths hidden and buried, as in the case of the Pisli hijacking. In looser terms, flashbacks break with the linearity of narrative in order to underscore a fragmented self and memory and thus the fluidity of memory, since flashbacks can function as memories or dreams with little or no association to the narrative. In Hostage flashbacks indicate in addition the traumatic experience of border-crossing as Elion’s memory and possibly his dreams are governed by memories of border-crossing and of the kind of violence that accompanies it, as Kapllani has demonstrated. Cinematic mobility, outside the frame, conveys the migrant as a traumatised man trapped in the transient space he occupies in the present, who moreover constantly dwells on those memories which highlight his inability to escape. Elion’s non-belonging in Albania is conveyed before a critical moment in the narrative. The bus is two hours from the Albanian border. Elion’s desperation and fear become increasingly uncontrollable and a sense of pervasive futility governs the scene as it becomes obvious that his plans for vindication are merely manifestations of the deluded migrant imagination. On course for the Albanian border, Elion addresses his hostages: ‘in a few hours, all this will be over. You have my word. I’ll take you to my house. My mother will make you a fine meal. Then you will be free to

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return home.’ The driver asks Elion if he has people waiting for him in Albania and he answers, ‘Sure I do. They’re waiting.’ Elion is a tragic figure, driven to destruction, unbeknownst to him, by superior and malicious forces and also by his unquenchable thirst for revenge and the wounded masculinity that resonates with the film’s opening epigraph: ‘one must live with honor like a man or die with honor’. It is apparent, however, that Elion is alone in his quest and in fact no one is waiting to welcome him in Albania. As the hijacking nears its tragic finale, tension escalates. The dead-end direction of the journey seems inevitable, as the montage becomes increasingly fragmented and tense, with fast and sudden cutting from Steadicam to handheld shots and vice versa, heightening claustrophobia and inescapability. One of the passengers, Grigoris, encourages Elion to get off the bus before reaching the border: ‘For Christ’s sake, what will you do in Albania?’ ‘No one will dare touch me up there. I’ll never set foot in Greece again,’ Elion responds. At this point, the atmosphere becomes loaded with an obvious sense of futility, implying that Elion’s martyrdom will end in an appropriately tragic manner, bringing to mind the ‘seer’s prediction at the film’s opening who, like Cassandra, urges Elion to think of his mother and to ‘stop this madness’ before it ends in tragedy. Elion moves to the bus door in a close-up, framed between a seat and a partition standing in front of the exit, his only escape route. The next shot shows Elion in an extreme close-up from the exterior of the window banging his head on the glass window. The dialectic of inside versus outside, with the camera placed outside the bus, conveys further Elion’s entrapment. The shot is shaky, filmed with a handheld camera that creates a sense of immediacy, highlighting Elion’s despair and establishing a sense of urgency, as his plans increasingly go downhill. He throws out the hand grenade he has been clutching for hours – his only form of collateral. In this moment of desperation, the narrative regresses to the critical moment in Albania where Elion is denied the privilege of marriage by his fiancée’s parents. By interrupting the narrative to depict this scene, Giannaris reveals that there is no one to welcome him, particularly since his second return will mark yet another failure in his struggle. Elion is forced to migrate by the undefeatable force of patriarchy. His father died three years before the action in the film. The only man left in the house therefore is the elder of the two sons, Elion. The Albanian police chief makes this very clear to Elion’s mother: ‘No home without a woman, especially when there’s no man around.’ Indeed, the fall of the communist regime heralded the return of age-old patriarchal customs, particularly in Albania’s north, and with that very lofty mandates on young men. Women

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were entirely excluded from the social sphere and detained within a highly protective household governed by kinship rules and the law of the father.23 In Elion’s case, migrating to Greece was not merely a necessity of survival for a poor and broken family, but even more an effort to prove to his prospective in-laws that he was capable of fulfilling his obligations as an Albanian man, where men have to accede to the traditional role of the pillar of the house. His mission was essentially set by his father in-law. When Elion addresses him as ‘father’ he responds ‘I am not your father and never will be.’ With the last remaining patriarch of Elion’s home dead, and Elion’s having sold the only piece of land that he owned, they are not willing to give their underage daughter to an unworthy man. Moreover, his failed attempt to find work in Greece the first time is a ‘disgrace’ that everyone talks about, according to the prospective mother-in-law. The discussion, as it turns out, is not centred around the prospect of marriage as much as on asserting male hierarchies. This is highlighted in Elion’s mother’s protest: ‘You’re wrong. Very wrong. Why do you believe all this stupid talk? My son is a man! You hear? A man!’ Bearing in mind how frequently Elion refers to his wounded manhood we can argue that his motivation stems from this trauma, which shaped the Albanian migrant imagination. The persistence of patriarchy in Albania and in Elion’s consciousness as a major value is also obvious in his discussion with Iliana, one of his hostages. Iliana, weary of familial restrictions and the obligations of motherhood and marriage in Greece, has left her family to be with her lover Grigoris, both of them hostages of Greece’s version of patriarchal custom. Elion mentions that ‘in Albania, if a woman even looks at another man, she’s dead. Here they are all whores’, unaware, as a tragic hero, that this very custom is responsible for his plight. Patriarchal custom appears to bring Elion and hostages closer as a transnational phenomenon. Yet Elion believes in its value and significance, an issue that heightens his tragic allure as a man blind to his own predicament. This reveals how there is no escape from the clutches of an identity that has been forced upon him and which strangely enough is his only source of motivation. According to Kapllani ‘only if he makes a success of a life abroad, only then can he make peace with his own country. If he doesn’t make it, he will be left hanging, at odds with the world and with the universe’.24 This rather sentimental comment exposes the burden of Albanian custom, since Albanian men are expected to fulfil a high expectation without any alternative. By revealing the migrant imagination, Giannaris exposes the internal divisions of a transitional society that underlie the foundations of its political and social struggle. The push and pull factors of Albanian migration to Greece underlie the complex process that turns an individual, and in this

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case an immigrant, into a criminal. The migrant imagination in Hostage is linked to economic prospects and, more, to male hierarchies in Albanian society which force Elion to prove his masculine qualities to Albanians and Greeks. When he negotiates on the telephone with a newscaster, he demands ten million euros from the Greek government in ransom. ‘Ten million for Greece is nothing’, says Elion, revealing his misguided perception of ‘the-world-beyond’ as an economic Eldorado. Elion’s imagination is also his source of motivation and courage. Kapllani describes this in his text: ‘He has to make it, not simply because people back home expect something from him; that’s the least of it. He has to make it because he cannot go back a failure. The thought of failure makes him tremble like a child afraid of the dark.’25 Kapllani’s words indeed resonate with the mandates of Albanian society and Elion’s tenacious struggle to ‘make it’. Elion therefore crosses for a second time to Greece, determined to succeed this time through illegal arms trade with Mpiris, the Greek police chief of Kato Scholari. For Kapllani, migrants can be divided into two groups, those who ‘make it and those who do not’. For those who do, it is an opportunity to forget about the past and be redeemed of its burden. For those who fail though, ‘memory comes back with a vengeance, more cynical this time, breaks down all barriers and fills your spirit with screams which replace words, or with words that make you stutter with ghosts and shadows that haunt your nightmares by night and feed your neurosis by day’.26 Elion is thus in a perpetual dialogue with his past. The memories, thrown to the viewer and inserted into the film very suddenly without a clear pretext, are a burden he must bear. Interestingly, when Elion articulates his wounded masculinity (‘[they did to me] things that you do not do a man’, evoking his sexual abuse in detention), he literally stutters. Such is the trauma of his experience in Greece and such is the force of the traumatic memory that remains. The narrative regresses to Elion’s rape during a crucial sequence where suspense reaches a climax. In Albania, the bus stops at a barricade set up by the Albanian police forces. An officer calls out through a loudspeaker, ‘You’re not going anywhere pal, the game is over.’ Elion crouches behind a seat clutching his Kalashnikov and looks down in fear. In the next shot, which transposes us back to another flashback, two Greek police officers drag Elion to a warehouse where they question him and discover that he had an affair with the Greek police chief ’s wife. The dialogue that follows illustrates the vulgar nature of Greek patriarchy and nationalism and the ugly face of police brutality. ‘Nothing good can come of it. Fucking a guy’s wife is bad enough. But fucking his wife and being a foreigner and

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all is like . . .’ the other officer completes the sentence ‘. . . cutting the guy’s dick off in his own home.’ The dialogue initially highlights the subordinate role of women in a patriarchal society where women are passive receptors of an aggressive expression of masculinity that directly implies penetration as that expression. Moreover, it exposes the magnitude of humiliation that a Greek man suffers when another man, and especially a foreigner, ‘violates’ his wife in his own home considering the connotations of the domestic space as the nation. In this respect, the most appropriate punishment is for the betrayed man to penetrate him as well, not merely as a form of punishment but as an expression of domination and humiliation of the opponent which the term ‘fuck’ suggests. The men penetrate Elion with a glass bottle, emasculating and humiliating him as he did to the chief. Giannaris saves the most traumatic experience for the ending, revealing the extent of Elion’s suffering, the foundations of the migrant imagination, eliciting compassion from the audience.

Migration and Emigration as a Vicious Cycle Border-crossing in Hostage is portrayed in a circular pattern, and Giannaris conceives Elion as a dweller on the threshold of Greece and Albania. In the present, Elion is inside the bus while in his flashbacks he is either en route, traversing the Greek–Albanian border to and fro, or in detention. The memories of border-crossing, detention, torture and rejection indicate that Elion imagines himself solely as a border subject and sufferer of border syndrome, a migrant who lives and works in the liminal spaces of the host society, where illegality and neoliberal economic precariousness govern the lives of migrants. This structure drives home circularity as a permanent lifestyle. Eighty-one minutes into the film the bus stops at a toll control point at the border. This is a key moment in the journey’s trajectory as a flashback shows a moment in time when Elion crossed the mountains to Greece – the other direction of his ongoing trajectory. The journey’s trajectory and encounter with borders is revealed through scattered flashbacks. The very nature of the flashbacks, conveyed through a nondiegetic montage, evokes his fragmented psyche and traumatic experience of border-crossing, in other words, how Elion suffers from border syndrome. The claustrophobic space of the bus underlines entrapment as a permanent modus vivendi. Additionally, it informs us of the claustrophobic space of his memories, which stem from the confinement of the bus, a neutral transitory space which distorts his memories and shapes his entire existence. It is no coincidence that the memories of borders

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emerge while Elion is on the bus, without any escape route. His present state keeps him in a perpetual dialogue with the events that inevitably transformed him into a border subject and with the migrant imagination that fuels his flight and tenacity. The bus arrives at the Greek–Albanian border. Tension escalates as the soundtrack is compiled mostly of low frequency sounds that generate a sense of dread while the soft focus of the camera creates unease and a sense of dislocation within the claustrophobic interior of the bus. At that moment, Elion asks Grigoris ‘Have we arrived?’ The question begs the answer: where have we arrived? Arriving somewhere in itself implies reaching a final destination and a sense of relief. For Elion, a border subject, this question persistently accompanies him through his journey(s). The irony is that arriving at the border does not signal reaching a destination, but simply passing through another transitory space and having to start the next phase of a neverending journey, much like Sisyphus with his eternal task. The pointlessness of arrival and futility of the notion per se is further emphasised when Grigoris asks Elion ‘Where are we going?’ returning thus to Elion’s question, which points out his dead-end track and that of his hostages, who have been transformed by this point into border subjects and social pariahs through their identification with Elion as sacred ‘Other’ (Stockholm syndrome). ‘Straight ahead. There is only one road’, answers Elion unveiling thus the direction of the bus – to nowhere. Elion sounds confident but his words betray him.

Figure 4.1 Elion appears entirely trapped in the claustrophobic enclosure of the bus in Hostage (Giannaris 2005).

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Before this, we get a glimpse of the Greek–Albanian border through an establishing shot. The reception prepared at the borders, which reveals also the criminalisation, ethnicisation and policing of borders in Greece, includes a police squad and soldiers shown in a quick montage sequence exiting their automobiles, bearing machine guns with a stern look while a group of skinheads present at the scene implies the existence of paramilitary groups – a different and hostile Greek microcosm outside the evocative interior of the bus. The Greek police chief approaches the bus in which Elion is hunched behind a partition, looking terrified, the machine gun in his hand seeming like a useless prop. The frontality and narrow framing of each man in tight close-ups enhances the pervading sense of claustrophobia that has transformed the bus into, in Naficy’s coinage, a phobic structure. The mise-en-scène reflects claustrophobia and is compiled by tight shot composition, erratic camera movement and soft focus, impeding vision. The bus functions at once as a safe haven and a trap in which Elion becomes willingly deterritorialised and paradoxically empowered. This functions according to the therapeutic nature of the enclosed space of protest but, as a duplicitous space of otherness, the bus simultaneously immobilises Elion and thus his sense of empowerment is pathological. Elion’s inability to escape is highlighted by the Albanian phrase ‘mirupafshim’ which the chief utters. This translates as ‘till we meet again’, implying that they will meet again and possibly for the last time. The power of the borders asserts itself on the migrant, reminding him of his curse as a border subject. It is in turn implied that Elion will meet the border once more. The barrier and stop sign lying ahead dividing Greece from Albania, shown through the interior of the bus, stand as signifiers of the criminalisation of borders, suggesting directly the illegality of bordercrossing. In this respect, Elion and his hostages are all border subjects and illegal immigrants. In the bus, Elion is framed from a close-up through a handheld camera with the interior space in the background in soft focus implying his dislocation from the space he occupies. His detachment from physical space and constant dwelling in the space of his memories, seemingly with no idea of a realistic future plan, underline the pathos of a tragic hero gradually departing from this world. In this moment, montage emphasises the notion that Elion is a dweller on the thresholds of exile. From the stark interiors and Elion’s gaze into the darkness, we are taken to the mountainous area of the Greek border. A panoramic shot reveals a solitary figure walking in a vast clearing on a sunny day. The pace of the beat soundtrack creates further a sense of immediacy that negates the ease

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and freedom of the wilderness, as a close-up on Elion, through a shaky handheld camera, is a sudden transition from the panoramic, almost postcard view of a beautiful landscape. Elion’s erratic pace is suddenly interrupted as he stops to gaze at the border signpost. A 180-degree tracking shot that moves behind Elion’s shoulder reveals the large sign standing tall in front of him, as though a dialogue is taking place in that moment between border subject and border. The large board that has been erected at the end of the clearing in a forest states in big letters: ‘Hellenic Republic. No crossing beyond this point. Entry strictly forbidden.’ The arbitrary nature of the mountainous border is obvious as there is no entry point at the particular location but simply a sign that suggests that beyond this point is Greek soil. On the sign, the Greek and European Union flags are juxtaposed, exposing thus the intention of Europe to fortify the south against potential invaders. The sign introduces a familiar impression of claustrophobia similar to the preceding bus scene. The restricting nature of the border signpost generates claustrophobia, which is present regardless of the claustrophobic environment per se since for the clandestine migrant hiding and feeling trapped are inevitable and signify a general state of being. Elion crosses the invisible border and treads through the rough environment. He then stumbles onto a military border patrol which has apprehended a convoy of Asian migrants and hides behind a bush, looking onto the passing convoy. The frontality of the shot of Elion behind the bush, his apprehensive look and hunched posture, are similar to the various partition shots. Claustrophobia haunts Elion, who as a migrant is constantly trapped in spaces which, whether natural or artificial, are equally claustrophobic and command bodily posture and functions that express a nervous state, sweating, panting and looking in fear. The flashback disturbs the linear narrative of border-crossing. How much time has elapsed since they crossed into Albania? Back in the bus Grigoris stands up to talk to Elion, crouched and sleeping behind the same partition. One may assume the flashback was actually Elion’s dream: he is haunted by the borders so much that his dreams always remind him of his bordered existence. This may be paranoia, or, in other words, persecution mania, but Giannaris suggests the opposite through montage. The irregularity of montage raises many questions: it could be argued that before the flashback, Elion actually fell asleep and what we saw was his dream which is also reality. The feeling of time elapsed from before the flashback till the question ‘Where are we heading?’ is confusing. Time and narrative are essential for a diegetic montage yet, in this scene, fragmentation evokes

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Figure 4.2 The postures of clandestine migration: Elion appears hunched behind a bush in Hostage (Giannaris 2005).

the fragmented man haunted by borders. Ultimately, Elion’s paranoia is made real and tangible. What is important here is that both scenes suggest similar connotations but are staged at borders. The Greek–Albanian border in the present tense resembles an actual entry point thanks to the stop sign and barrier, and is on a developed and guarded urban landscape, while the Albanian–Greek border in Elion’s flashback is demarcated merely by a signpost. Regardless of any markers, both generate border syndrome. Let us consider here that in the first scene, Elion crosses the border to Albania for a second time while in the other, we see the flashback of his second crossing to Greece. Montage materialises numerous connotations as we have seen, amongst them the impression that Elion is a dweller on the threshold, crossing borders in a circular pattern. Elion is conjured as a border subject in the past and present, someone who occupies exclusively claustrophobic and interstitial spaces, the border being one by definition. It is as though he was born a border subject, which further enhances his tragic allure as a man condemned to marginality. The patterns of Albanian migration to Greece were not far from circular since sharing a border meant that Albanians could repeatedly cross over.27 In this respect, Elion’s plight is emblematic of the dead-end life of Albanian migrants who would repeatedly attempt to cross the border as though caught in a vicious cycle. Kapllani solidifies this circular pattern as a particular feature of Albanian migration,

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and highlights life on and around the border as a major cause of border syndrome: He suddenly makes another calculation: thirty-four times in seven years, AlbaniaGreece-Albania-Greece. If you added on the days spent in detention centres each time they deported him, it was unbelievable. Of the last seven years of his life, two of them have been literally spent on the borders.28

By maintaining inertia and circularity in the present, Giannaris denies Elion the opportunity to break free of his constraints, driving home a painful protest. Elion’s life in the present is thus a mere repetition of his traumatic past that signifies a sense of permanent loss, as though his fate has been decided by an unwritten law of Albanian migration. To quote Naficy ‘this circular structure helps drive home the dystopian point that for exiles in the societies of control there is no outside anymore’.29 The entire story that unfolds, transforming the linear journey of redemption into a repetition of Elion’s past, becomes an orbit around Elion creating a sense of permanent loss, as though his fate has already been decided by an unwritten law of Albanian migration. We can argue hence that Giannaris’s representation of Albanian migration (more than merely a portrayal of a true event), is indeed a ‘modern (ancient Greek) tragedy’, a quote by the Seattle Post printed on the film’s DVD release. Moreover, to quote Naficy’s assessment of exilic films, ‘this circular structure helps drive home the dystopian point that for exiles in the societies of control there is no outside anymore’.30 In other words, a cinematic portrayal of migration can serve as the backdrop of an existential meditation and particularly the loss of identity as the protagonist delves into otherness. Inescapability is highlighted further in the next sequence, in which Elion is again crouched behind a partition, clutching his Kalashnikov. The camera closes on his bewildered face, cutting back to an extreme close-up of Grigoris, to Elion, Grigoris and then the driver, who brakes abruptly as Albanian police cars arrive. They seem to have appeared out of nowhere, as though ubiquitous and otherworldly. Undeniably, Elion is persistently persecuted in the past and present since the police are omnipresent and their presence remains strategically concealed. An officer calls out, ‘You’re not going anywhere . . . the game is over’, and Elion crouches behind a seat, looking down in fear. At this point, where resistance is absolutely futile, we regress to the scene of Elion’s rape by two policemen in an abandoned warehouse, as though linking police brutality and their frightening presence on either side of the border. At this momentous point, Giannaris reveals the reason behind Elion’s thirst for revenge and provides further

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justification as Elion is entirely humiliated. At the same time, Giannaris establishes victimhood through embodied protest as Elion’s body becomes the site of great punishment which literally resonates in the present, as during the rape scene Elion’s cry acts as a sound bridge that connects the past with the present,31 Albania with Greece and the warehouse where Elion was raped and tortured with the open space of Elbasan in south Albania, where the film’s final act is staged. Elion’s suffering is brought from the private to the public space and highlights the transnational forms of violence that are inflicted on the body of Albanian immigrants in Greece. Nevertheless, in order to prove his innocence and right to justice, Elion needs to demonstrate his wounds and his cry must be audible and amplified. This feature of the migrant’s experience and suffering finds its immediate correspondence in Naficy’s exegesis of life in exile and highlights the trauma that accompanies embodied protest. The narrative works against Elion’s mobility. The film opens with a sequence within the dilapidated space Elion has transformed into a home. It is an abandoned building – essentially a shed – within a larger construction site that belongs to the Greek police chief who illegally employs Elion – a form of neo-slavery popular during the 1990s which saw migrants living on-site.32 His shed has access to water but otherwise it does not resemble a home. The glossy tourism poster of Rome on the wall accentuates the desire for escape and also the dystopic character of Elion’s dwellings, since Elion is not engaged with a tourist’s image of the world like that reflected in the poster. It is a reminder of the kind of access that tourists are granted and migrants denied. Elion’s disconnection from a home and public space is highlighted by his mother’s letter, when she reads in the voice-over: ‘My darling, come home. In your own land people will exploit you to the bone. In a strange land they will devour the bones as well.’ The letter brings to the fore the sense of dislocation also heightened in the bus, and functions as a precursor to the tragedy that will unfold as his mother’s words equate life in exile with bodily suffering. From the very beginning, audiences are given sufficient information to assume that indeed the film’s protagonist is bound by tragedy.

The Tragedy that Befalls Migrants Panayota Mini emphasises that Elion’s affair with [his employer’s] wife, which has left her pregnant, means that ‘the immigrant who has exceeded his role as a body for labour and become a body for love and reproduction, is [. . .] abused’.33 Elion’s body becomes thus a canvas on which nationalism and patriarchy are displayed in their most grotesque form. This most

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traumatic experience and shocking sequence drives home the notion that Elion is the definitive victim of Greek nationalism and not the stereotype of an Albanian criminal. The final moral message implies that solidarity can happen only on the premise that the migrant is victimised. The film’s overreliance on the tragedy that befalls Elion is indicative of the hypocrisy and paternalism that Pascal Bruckner detects in left-wing championing of Third World causes. He argues that atoning for our guilty conscience, for what has been unjustly inflicted on migrants and refugees, ‘is still a way of staying on the crest of history’ as the ‘kings of infamy’.34 |He points out that this well-intentioned rhetoric can very often be Eurocentric, as the migrant is conceived as a victim in order to highlight the culpability and guilty conscience of first-world audiences. Being a tragic victim though, audiences are absolved of any responsibility towards the migrant ‘Other’. Moreover, by projecting victimhood as a salient feature of the migrant and as the film’s moral message, Elion is absolved of all responsibility and ‘plunged into [a] condition of infantilism’.35 Indeed, the more the film assumes its tragic allure, the more Elion fulfils the role of a wretched individual bereft of all agency, unable to determine his own destiny and to assume responsibility for his adult decisions. Seconds before his fatal execution, after hours of crouching, he finally stands up to look at his mother, exclaiming ‘Mama’ with an innocent expression that emblematises his frailty and foolishness. Bruckner emphasises that victimhood reinforces the centrality of firstworld audiences. This is indeed a fundamental issue in Hostage and the main premise on which the dynamic between Elion and his hostages develops. Utilising the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome, which commands sympathy with one’s captor, Giannaris conceives the body of the ‘Other’ as a mirror that reflects the alienation of indigenous Greeks, who are seen as subaltern border subjects in a patriarchal society. The passengers form a stereotypical Greek miscrocosm echoing the sociopolitical zeitgeist of late twentieth-century Greece: a young nationalist and heroin addict, an oppressed lesbian daughter of an Orthodox priest, a spoiled and closeted girl, a mother and her lover who are plagued by Greece’s custom of patriarchy, a working-class bus driver, a Nigerian refugee and black market CD vendor and a multitude of provincial middle-aged men and women. Mini concurs that while the viewer is asked to contemplate the process that transforms Elion into a hostage, we redirect our attention to the passengers who are implicitly ‘hostages of the scourges of modern Greek society’.36 Stockholm Syndrome implies not merely empathy but identification with Elion, who assumes the role of sacred ‘Other’, a Christ-like figure

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whose struggles in Greece and Albania mirror the overall plight of his hostages. His journey of emigration is also a means to laying out certain religious connotations, as though to imply that Elion is bearing the trauma of his hostages, like a modern-day Jesus Christ. Elion’s messianic appeal is unreservedly embodied. In one scene, Iliana tenderly rubs cream into Elion’s sore hand while, in another, one of the girls touches his wounds like a Doubting Thomas. These moments provide Elion with an otherworldly allure and elicit pity as the foundation of solidarity. Elion’s sacred allure indicates his non-belonging amongst the living, as though he cannot be granted individuality and straightforward humanity. The ultimate manifestation of Elion’s Christ-like features emerges in an argument with the junky, Orpheus. They both exchange cliché racist jokes, sparking a fight that is evocative of the tense encounter between Albanian migrants and indigenous Greeks and a lasting rivalry between the neighbouring Balkan nations. This is a crucial moment in the film and the only one where Elion is vocal about his plight as he declares, ‘You leave all the work to the foreigners. You treat us like animals. I did every single job. Everyone in the village loved me.’ This is an unsettling moment in the film as Giannaris confronts his Greek audience directly. At the same time though, he affirms the ideal image of the migrant that comes across here as the ‘good’ Albanian, who does all the work, who ‘overcompensates’ so as to be ‘loved by everyone’. In other words, Elion embodies the features of an Albanian ‘slave’. This term appeared often in racist discourse that endorsed the exploitation of Albanians and their exclusion from the Greek labour force. ‘The expression “I am not your Albanian” that is, “I am not your slave”, is often used by Greeks to refuse a job which is seen as menial and underpaid.’37 The mantra ‘isolation, overcompensation, submission’ is the master narrative of border subjects like Elion. Yet, although Elion is carrying his Kalashnikov and grenade, he seems vulnerable to the words of his hostage and, embodying protest again, lifts his shirt to show his wounds in a close-up, stuttering ‘the things they did to me . . . you don’t do to a man’. His entire torso is indeed blemished by scars and bruises resembling the figure of St Sebastian, whose torso is pierced by arrows in Renaissance paintings. At the same time that Elion embodies the pain of exile, he reflects the junkie’s wounds from heroin use as the latter turns his head, visibly conflicted. Elion’s words are therefore dampened by the tragedy of embodied protest. This dynamic implies that audiences are asked to think about their own physical and emotional wounds in order to show compassion. It is as though in order to provide a response to the ‘Other’ we first need to acknowledge our own otherness and become ‘Other’ ourselves. Otherness then figures

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Figure 4.3 Embodied protest: Elion displays the scars on his body, in a close-up in Hostage (Giannaris 2005).

as a panacea that makes ‘Us’ better people. Therefore, I argue that although Hostage initially places the migrant as the subject of the film, maintaining a close focus on his journey and subjectivity, he becomes objectified as a national avatar. The Albanian migrant is therefore a stand-in for the Greek protagonist. The migrant is a border subject, but so are all of ‘Us’. This crisis in self-representation in Greek cinema is indicative of a wider crisis of identity in Europe and European culture and not an isolated phenomenon; it is linked to a general fascination with the ‘Other’ as ‘cultural hero’as Karalis has pointed out.38 This popular strategy of self-representation echoes the logic of multiculturalism, that is, the notion of a host society that favours diversity over cultural difference and of a dominant culture that displays diverse ‘Other’ cultures within its own grid of power and meaning. Within this hegemonic sphere of interaction and representation, identity is constructed ‘through the active demarcation of a self in relation to some other’,39 meaning that the migrant functions as a constitutive ‘Other’ which implies that identities are not part of the natural order of things, but in constant flux and ‘emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion [. . .]’.40 Hostage is a suitable example of an emerging multiculturalism that figures as the sign of a tolerant society of a European calibre. It is visible in the display of various divisions of belonging in the bus but more so in certain symbolic gestures. For instance the girl feeling Elion’s wounds, as though exploring the body of the ‘Other’, and the moment Orpheus,

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feeling afraid, extends his hand to the generally submissive and silent Nigerian refugee as though to draw strength. These moments allegorise a European multicultural nation state as a homogenised locus, in which the migrant ‘Other’ is contained and does not pose a threat to the host society but serves as a commodity. The allegorical social setting of the bus is thus one where cultural difference is maintained in the background in order to achieve a sense of rapprochement, a utopia of tolerance and togetherness, which, however, requires a strict hierarchical order whereby the migrant appears as a spectacle for (Greek) audiences to observe and learn from. To better understand this, one may consider the brief yet meaningful appearance of the Nigerian refugee who processes in silence Orpheus’s vulgar racist slur, one typically addressed to Black Africans which, under more realistic conditions, would provoke a riot. Framing at this point reinforces his wretchedness and submissive stance. In an extreme close-up, with Orpheus in the background, as though superseding him, the refugee looks down and closes his eyes in silence. When he does however articulate himself, it is only to inform Orpheus that his family was killed in Nigeria. It is as though we can coexist only if the ‘Other’ has suffered eruptive violence and does not pose a threat to the established hierarchy. This is what it means to live in a world without differences. The purpose, then, of the refugee is to give strength and some humanity to this stereotype of a Greek bigot. When doing so, he uses a soft tone to reassure his adversary, who at this point is reduced to a frightened child. Nevertheless, as the morality tale demands, the racist bigot has gained tolerance and humanity thanks to the refugee’s suffering, while the refugee comes out of this encounter no less marginal and disenfranchised. It is these other silent forms of violence that the film sets out to undermine through its evocative flashbacks. Yet Giannaris undermines systemic violence by resorting to the kind of melodramatic sensationalism of physical violence that trumps invisible forms. In order to prove his innocence, Elion needs to show his scars of torture, his blemished body, and make his painful cry audible in order to prove his suffering and the injustices he has endured. Despite the film’s groundbreaking focus on an Albanian criminal as the protagonist, the migrant’s rebellion is questionable exactly because his agency is restricted within the realm of self-destruction. Much like the pathological nature of his voluntary confinement in the bus, which Elion sees as empowering, his tragedy is telling of the pathological nature of his agency and empowerment since the hijacking is suicidal – an issue which only he seems unaware of. Bodily suffering and death render Elion the definitive victim of transnational forces whose story gains visibility because of the sensational nature of physical violence.

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Notes 1. Naficy coins the term to refer to films that feature individuals living in border regions, for example on the borders of Mexico and the United States. Here, I will be using the term with greater liberty to refer to those that turn the spotlight on clandestine immigrants living on borders and within various symbolic borders in the host society. 2. Loshitzky (2010), p. 15. 3. Kapllani (2010). 4. Ibid., p. 2. 5. Naficy (2001), p. 189. 6. Kapllani (2010), p. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 152. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 102. 10. Ibid., p. 10. 11. Ibid., p. 127. 12. Ponzanesi (2012), p. 677. 13. It should be noted here that Naficy relies on an androcentric and sexist point of view, assuming that hysteria and eating disorders are restricted exclusively to women. 14. For example, refugees and asylum seekers on hunger strike. 15. Naficy (2001), p. 189. 16. Kapllani (2010), p. 4. 17. Bordo (1993), p. 168. 18. A matching illustration appears in 12 Years a Slave (McQueen 2013) where Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) literally works herself to death, convinced that in return her master will treat her as his favourite. 19. Naficy (2001), p. 190. 20. Kapllani (2010), p. 79. 21. Naficy (2001), p. 189. 22. Balibar (2003), p. 76. 23. Fischer (1999), pp. 281–301. 24. Kapllani (2010), p. 10. 25. Ibid., p. 15. 26. Ibid., pp. 143–4. 27. Thanks to geographical proximity, Albanians would cross over to Greece through the mountains and the coastlines of the islands which could not be easily guarded and fortified. See King (2000), pp. 8–9. 28. Kapllani (2010), p. 34. 29. Naficy (2001), p. 195. 30. Ibid. 31. Celik (2015), p. 92. 32. Psimmenos (2001), p. 35.

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124 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Mini (2006a), p. 75. Bruckner (2010), p. 35. Ibid., p. 148. Mini (2006a), p. 75. Lazaridis (1999), p. 118. Karalis (2012), p. 239. Ang (1996), p. 23. Hall (1996b), p. 4.

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C HA PT ER 5

Neither ‘Good’ nor ‘Bad’: Reinventing Albanian Identities in Eduart and Mirupafshim

This chapter will address filmic portrayals of Albanian migrants and the kind of stereotypes that showcased Greek fears towards ‘illegal’ Albanian immigrants. See You (Voupouras and Korras 1997) and Eduart (Antoniou 2006) are ideal departure points from which to discuss the role of contemporary Greek cinema in proposing innovative frameworks of identification and to explore cultural difference beyond extreme binary oppositions. The terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mentioned in the chapter title are widespread and recognisable adjectives used in arguably every culture to indicate an acceptable and non-acceptable immigrant, one that poses a threat to the host society and another that is more easily accepted. At the same time, the racism underlying this framework foregrounds the suspicion of the host society towards migrants and refugees. In order to comprehend this process and how stereotypes had such a hold on Albanian immigrants and on Greek thought, I investigate the origins of so-called ‘Albanophobia’ and the ‘processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse’.1 The focus here is on cultural representation. Therefore, this chapter will afford a wider discussion on identity in order ‘to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’.2 That being said, it is worth asking: do the proposed films move beyond the essentialising logic of stereotyping and what forms of identification do they propose? How do they manage to showcase cultural difference and why does this matter? I will approach these questions through close readings of the films with an emphasis on theme, character analysis and to a lesser extent form. The aim is to explore the grey area between the two extremes of migrant identities in host societies, in other words, what it implies to move beyond

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binary terms that carry great bias, such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ migrants. These terms are often intertwined with ethnicity by the mass media, which identify migrants by nationality. According to the arbitrary mechanisms of stereotyping, nationality can be easily attributed to behavioural features. Thus, ‘Poles have “a different attitude, they impose themselves,” Iraqis “are adaptive,” Albanians are “disruptive and violent”’.3 News of insurrection and financial instability in Albania combined with the popular myth of Balkan brigandage made a recipe for stereotyping. For Greece, history has produced a great fear of Albanians and, unsurprisingly, ‘the immediate Greek response [to Albanian immigrants] was near-hysterical, with allegations of the terrible criminality of Albanians and the need to secure the borders against them’, although immigrant crime was confined to robbery, theft and beggary with rape and murder ‘committed overwhelmingly by Greeks’.4 Research on the criminality of Albanian immigrants in the Athenian press has yielded decisive evidence against such claims. In their efforts to produce sensational articles, the press conjured the Greek nation as a home violated by hostile invaders.5 While criminality is at first thought linked to crime per se, in the case of immigrants, it is linked to policy. The criminalisation of border-crossing constitutes migrants’ status as illegal and illegal migration in Greece was a criminal offence punishable by law. News articles on Albanian criminality consolidated nationality with the stereotype reducing the (criminal) act to an exclusive product of the stereotype and criminality as an inherent feature of Albanian ethnicity. News articles on Albanian criminality were viewed as proof. And while the conservative press disseminated the stereotype of the ‘bad’ Albanian, the progressive press produced the ‘good’ Albanian – a victim of racist violence and ‘an object of protection not a subject of rights’.6 To be stereotyped means to be ‘reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics’.7 In other words, stereotypes essentialise difference. For Homi Bhabha, the purpose of stereotyping, understood in his writing as colonial discourse, is to construe the ‘Other’ as an inferior population according to racial, ethnic and cultural origins, in order ‘to establish systems of administration and instruction’.8 In this respect, policy and stereotypes work in tandem to maintain the illegal status of migrants and reinforce an exclusive structure of belonging. What’s more, stereotypes are constantly repeated and reaffirmed, they transform and adapt, making it difficult to reconstruct a favourable image. Illegality and the conditions of slavery in which Albanian immigrants found themselves in Greece operated as one to construct the Albanian ‘criminal’ and ‘slave’ and with that the image of the Greek family man

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and ambitious European entrepreneur threatened by lawlessness. In order therefore to demarcate clear borders, it is necessary to distinguish between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Albanian. Loshitzky refers to this process as ‘screening’, a strategy of surveillance employed by European host nations: The idea of ‘screening’ migrants, of differentiating between the ‘indigenous’ population and desired and undesired migrants, is still influenced by popular and racist myths according to which immigrants bring disease and pollution to the body of the nation [. . .] and therefore need to be screened and contained. The process of screening practiced by the ‘host’ society (which very often is more hostile than hospitable) is to screen the ‘good immigrant’ and expel the ‘bad’ [. . .]. This instrumental approach to human lives explains the prominence of the screening metaphor in elite political discourse on migration, as well as in media and public responses to it.9

Through processes of assimilation and integration ‘which are in accordance with the models of citizenship adopted by each European nation state – ius sanguinis (law of blood), ius soli (law of soil) and ius domicile (law of residence) – it is hoped that the good migrants will be digested by the national and European body’.10 The ethnocentric bias of southern European countries bleeds into immigration policy and functions as a chokehold on migrants who find themselves in a state of illegality and marginal criminogenic spaces. The process that Loshitzky points out is founded on a binary logic which distinguishes between a subservient immigrant who can be easily assimilated and homogenised and an illegal criminal who is expelled from the body of the nation. One may recall here the words of Elion Senja in Hostage which rehash the schema of the ‘good’ migrant: ‘I did all the work . . . everyone in the village loved me.’ Integration and acceptance work in a hierarchical order that rests on the slave status of Albanians. However, as existing evidence points out, migration policy in 1990s Greece was driven by a sweeping logic which deemed all Albanian immigrants illegal. This process operated in relation to the concurrent descent of Ethnic Greeks who were summoned to rejoin the fatherland (patrida), a term which highlights with little subtlety the patriarchal foundations of the Greek nation. Ethnic Greeks were heavily discriminated against and had many of their rights removed by the Hoxha regime. The plight of Ethnic Greeks in Albania became a raison d’être for the expulsion of Albanians since not only did the former indicate the inherent criminality of Albanians but it also meant that Ethnic Greeks were seen as ‘one of our own’, while the Albanians were strangers. Although the mass media and police carried greater responsibility for the emergence of Albanophobia, a lot of damage had already been done

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in terms of public perception. There have been numerous reports of landlords systematically denying housing while research in schools has shown an increase in racist sentiments among children, which culminated in several cases of Albanian pupils in northern Greece who were not allowed to carry the Greek flag during school parades at national commemorations.11 Amongst a plethora of migrants, Albanians became the most popular constitutive ‘Other’ of Greeks. The latter highlights that identities are not part of the natural order of things, but are in constant flux and ‘emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion [. . .]’.12 In other words, identity is perpetually redefined in relation to the ‘Other’, highlighting and consequently containing difference, establishing the exclusive features of identity and an exclusive language of belonging to the detriment of immigrants. See You and Eduart are valuable sources of insight on the unsettling potential of cultural difference as they propose nuanced and complex identities and affiliations, contesting xenophobic discourse and simultaneously defying liberal, western views that produce the more painless version of migrant identities. In this respect, it should be noted that both films confront and deconstruct the myth of Albanian criminality and conversely link antisocial behaviour and deviancy to GrecoAlbanian nationalisms that respectively push young Albanians to the margins and demand that they adhere to patriarchal laws that deprive them of freedom and individuality. The two films therefore confront patriarchal custom and nationalism and project a transnational gaze that transcends national borders, revealing the differences and similarities between Greece and Albania.

From Xenophobia to Xenophilia: See You See You charts the way towards a radical representation of the dreaded stranger as its take on the host-foreigner dynamic is suggestive of xenophilia. The film’s release in 1997 is noteworthy since it coincided with the second wave of Albanian migration triggered after the descent of armed insurgents from Albania’s north during mass insurrection on the streets of Tirana. These events and concurrent migrant flows from Albania resonated in Greece, with reports of descending Balkan criminality from the tribal north endorsing sweep operations of undocumented migrants. See You is loosely based on the directors’ encounters in Greece and Albania with Albanians:

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Our first incentive was the appearance of Albanians in Greece and our first contact. We started hanging out with them and they truly won us over [. . .] we took note of every experience and of their adventures en route to Greece. In September 1991 we travelled for the first time to Vlorë.13

The film opens in a bus where the protagonist, Christos, becomes acquainted with Fuad, Victor and Omer. A Greek passenger forces out the Albanians with a racist slur to which other passengers remain unresponsive. Christos joins the Albanians and three minutes in, the migrants are in Christos’s apartment discussing their arduous journey to Greece. The apartment is adorned with the apparatus of a cultivated man: next to a map on the wall is a poster of the literary journal Byzance, between encyclopaedias, newspaper archives and collections of foreign currencies. Christos is a school teacher and a communist who was inspired by existing people, an aspect which is characteristic of the film’s documentary aesthetics: ‘We met a teacher in Florina who spent time with minorities, and especially with the so-called “Macedonian” [. . .]. We met the various Albanians through him, heard his stories and gradually formed the character of Christos.’14 Christos used to admire Enver Hoxha and was a member of the Communist Party till he experienced a sense of disillusionment following the failure of the left to respond to the rising hegemony of the ‘New Right’. Christos is also disillusioned by his own country, where he lives as an internal exile. It is no wonder then that he proudly declares ‘I have only Albanian friends’. Beyond nationhood, Christos identifies on subjective terms and sides with the most wanted pariahs of Greece. In their company, he discovers a concrete sense of belonging and sees a reflection of his own pariah status. What chain of events and intentions led to his hospitality? The abrupt editing, shifting from the opening scene directly to Christos’s home produces the impression of an invasion. By avoiding a linear action-based narrative, however, Korras and Voupouras articulate an invasion without defensive measures. This is a direct application of Jacques Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality which advocates absolute openness to the stranger. The directors dismiss even the scene of entry, the moment when the question of the foreigner is articulated. Christos apparently does not require a reason to offer hospitality. It is an automatic response to the presence of the Albanians, as Korras elucidates: He meets the Albanians and in the second scene, they are in his home. Do we need to wonder if there is a reason for this? Is it not enough that these people force him to reconsider his relationship to himself and his people? We also wanted to highlight

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that there is a tendency to comprehend cinema according to the notion of action and reaction, meaning that we need to always seek for a rational psychological explanation behind a certain reaction. Here, the reaction comes first and then numerous explanations that underline the protagonist’s deeper emotions and motivations.15

The initial response to such a taboo question as hospitality to Albanians is suggestive of the popular mantra ‘refugees welcome’ which contradicts the zeitgeist of the 1990s. Arguably, Christos offers hospitality not ‘out of duty’ or ‘in conforming with duty’ ‘for to be what it “must” be, hospitality must not pay a debt or be governed by a duty’. Christos offers hospitality ‘beyond debt and economy [. . .], a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor’.16 This is evident through the editing that evades the pretence of invitation and plea, transferring us directly into the household where the foreigner is ipse. At no point do the migrants cross the threshold; they are a natural feature of the apartment. Nevertheless, one needs to consider how cultural difference is portrayed in respect to hospitality. In Christos’s apartment, the Albanians are on display, demanding to be heard and looked at. They address the camera and discuss the harshness of work in Greece, as though being interviewed, blurring thus the boundaries between fiction and reality. For Bhabha, this is ‘the sign of the “cultured” and “civilised” attitude, the ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire; as though one should be able to collect and appreciate them’.17 In other words, there is a danger of facilitating diversity within a hegemonic sphere wherein difference dissolves. Christos is indeed eager to discover the Albanians’ cultural baggage because of his ideological inclinations, and particularly because they have experienced communism, especially Fuad, who was imprisoned for joining the Democratic Resistance. In this way, they conform to the logic of multiculturalism but at the same time are free to negotiate the terms of enunciation since in Christos’s apartment they are at home away from home. The Albanian friends are an outlet for Christos’s profound need to express his sense of (non)belonging. Christos is an outsider, divorced and estranged from his family. So he discovers in the ‘Other’ an opening to the world. Why is this so important? At a time when Albanians were accused for importing criminality, See You demands that Greek audiences open themselves and their homes to Albanians and their culture and by extension to all migrants. Hospitality and solidarity operate in direct reaction to racism. We see this in the opening sequence: ‘Dirty Albanians, you only steal and murder. We give you work and food and you can’t even give a dime in return . . . go

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back home.’ The passenger articulates the superiority of a gracious host towards an ungrateful guest, a popular rhetoric that justified the exclusion of Albanian immigrants. Eleven minutes into the film, Christos’s sister, Doksa, expresses a benchmark phrase of Greek xenophobia: ‘What do you find in them? Their dirtiness or their killing and stealing? You know I am not a racist . . . but I can’t tolerate these people.’ The stereotype solidified criminality as an indisputable fact. It is not coincidental that racist statements are followed by scenes of hospitality and intimate discussion. The editing does not serve diegetic or expressive purposes but is a means of articulating a new discourse that emerges through the juxtaposition of xenophobia and xenophilia. At another instant, Christos mentions Fuad to Doksa as ‘my Albanian friend’ and automatically incites her scorn. Once again, we cut to the interior of the apartment as though racism is without merit. Victor sits on the couch commenting on the faces on the television screen, Fuad waits at Christos’s desk for a phone call from Albania while Omer showers. This is another scene taken from the directors’ personal encounters. ‘There is nothing in the film that is not real. Everything is based on personal accounts of Albanians who chatted with us.’18 ‘In 1991 there were fourteen or fifteen Albanians who would come to my house, to shower and receive or make phone calls.’19 In the apartment, we are open to the migrants’ plight and their cultural affiliations. They discuss the scarcity of work and exploitation at the construction site, where Albanian builders earn half of what a Greek does. ‘There is no work for Albanians,’ Fuad declares. To be an Albanian in Greece is synonymous with being a pariah, but not in Christos’s apartment. Omer, however, is confident that he will find work as he tells Christos, Omer: Even Chams and gypsies find work. Christos: Why, what is wrong with Chams? Omer: Don’t you know what Chams are? They have no honour, they stab you in the back, all of them. Chams, Czechs, Jews, gypsies and blacks.

To allow the migrants the freedom to express personal prejudice is to structure a more inclusive system of representation through and not without difference, no matter how unsettling. And, as the film ultimately shows, no individual, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is immune to racism and Albanians can become oppressors regardless of the oppression they face in Greece. The Albanian friends are thus neither favourable nor entirely alienating and alien characters, for to accept them as friends rather than strangers, others, good or bad, signifies opennesss to the entire spectrum of difference. Ultimately,

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no individual is immune to racism, and Albanians can become oppressors regardless of the oppression they face in Greece. This is evident in the opening since it is a gypsy, another historically persecuted ethnic group, who attacks the Albanians. On the sympathy and fetishisation of immigrants, Slavoj Žižek has persistently argued on erasing the link between immigrants and refugees and humanitarian empathy which, according to Žižek is grounded in compassion for their suffering. Instead, he invites his readers to understand the ‘Other’ as someone potentially worse than what we anticipate: ‘what if “getting to know them” reveals that they are more or less like us – impatient, violent, demanding – plus, usually, part of a culture that cannot accept many of the features we perceive as self-evident?’20 Considering Žižek’s unapologetic opposition to liberal perceptions of migrant identities, Christos’s Albanian friends are neither favourable nor entirely alienating: to accept them as potential friends rather than strangers signifies openness to the entire spectrum of difference. Within the framework then of the (cinematic) encounter, the film, like Žižek, asks what it means to welcome refugees and immigrants beyond the confines of stereotypical discourse or a utopian imagination which sees the ‘Other’ as a benevolent individual, an object of affection or even a friend. Instead, we are invited to welcome migrant characters through difference, granting them individuality and genuine humanity, moving beyond the constraints of otherness and looking at them as equals.

Unfavourable Identities In Christos’s apartment, Victor boasts about his long journey to Greece and drive for adventure. Victor’s monologue incites a sense of excitement and wonder which forces out any unsettling sensation linked to migrant invasions or tragedies: I do not have a passport, so I walk. An Albanian knows no limit, he can walk for days. Is Africa far away? I had work in Ioannina, but I left. I am like a bird. I want to see the world. I want to be Magellan. Do you know Magellan?

According to Victor, an Abanian migrant is not a tragic outsider, but a traveller on a perpetual exploration, satisfying innate restlessness and wanderlust. Victor recounts his experience on the island of Naxos where he worked for a month and a half, earning good wages enjoying good company, food and drink. ‘So why did you leave?’ Christos asks. ‘I got bored. I wanted to leave. A month and a half is too long.’ Victor’s inexplicable desire for flight reflects the ethos of a vagabond. His wanderlust is the

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material from which ‘travel films’ are made, where spontaneous journeys set the stage for a transformative interaction of emotional landscapes with visual landscapes – ‘the world’ in Victor’s words.21 In travel films, the protagonist is often on a quest for answers to profound questions and often suffers for his uncompromising attitude. The motivations and emotions of travellers are often left to the imagination and the travellers themselves are a mystery that continuously interacts with a suggestive visual landscape that mirrors a distraught emotional terrain. In road movies the pleasures of mobility and vision combine to transform the self yet, in See You, the journeyman’s wandering becomes an anchor for an essence that can never be seized. Victor is indeed a conflicted and conflicting character. Victor’s identity is emblematic of the vagabond as a symbol of anarchy and non-fixity. In his meditations on identity, Zygmunt Bauman addresses the heterogeneity of the vagabond, which provides some insight on Armando Dauti’s rebel vagabond. According to Bauman, What made the vagabonds so terrifying was their apparent freedom to move and so to escape the net of heretofore locally based control. Worse than that still, the movements of the vagabond are unpredictable; unlike the pilgrim the vagabond has no destination. You do not know where he will move to next, because he himself does not know nor care much. Vagabondage has no advance itinerary – its trajectory is patched together bit by bit, one bit a time. Each place is for the vagabond a stopover, but he never knows how long he will stay in any of them; this will depend on the generosity and patience of the residents, but also on news of other places arousing new hopes (the vagabond is pushed from behind by hopes frustrated, and pulled forward by hopes untested).22

Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s work on identity, See You proposes a ‘third term’ of identification as the meaning of ‘Albanian’ is open to a sum of ‘different elements of experience and subjective position’.23 This third term is ‘traveller’, an Albanian vagabond. Christos articulates the elusive character of Victor during a stroll: Victor: You know, I was a horse rider in a film about Hoxha. Victoris was a good acrobat. Christos: Not Victoris . . . Victoras [the correct Greek rendition], like the wind [victoras, opos ageras].

Dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, Victor’s figure is reminiscent of James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955), where the leather jacket emblematises rebelliousness and hyper-masculinity. In transnational cinema, this topos becomes embellished with distinct cultural elements and the hybridity of migrant identities generating a greater

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degree of ambiguity. Like his American counterpart, Victor gets into trouble as he struggles with the contradictions of his identity, his social surroundings and quest for purpose in his nomadic life. He drinks, often receives a beating and gets sick crossing the borders. He talks about the arduous journey to Corfu from Albania as though it were a casual stroll and mentions the beatings he endured with pride. Yet, while he boasts about taking by force the woman he desires, a young woman who has set her eyes on him generates greater fear than sexual appetite. This hesitation is a first indication of repressed homosexuality. Victor’s tenacious struggle for exclusive ownership of Christos and his jealousy over the close friendship between Christos and Fuad further weakens a heteronormative approach. There is a strong bond between Christos and Fuad, based on fraternity and solidarity, central ideals of Christos’s worldview. A particularly touching and revealing sequence shows Christos defending Fuad when the proprietor of a bar asks him if he has money to pay for his drinks. Feeling frustrated, Fuad claims to have no one in the world, to which Christos responds ‘you have me’, and the pair embrace under a tall bird’s eye shot. Halfway through the film, Victor severs all ties with his companions and family over pride. Indeed, he does not join Christos in Albania and misses the chance to see his beloved mother because, unlike Fuad, he has not bought a car, an essential purchase that Albanians at home expected, particularly since with the building of roads, cars became increasingly necessary in post-communist Albania. The source of Victor’s emotional plight potentially is the severity of Albanian patriarchy and familial expectations. At no point though is this clearly articulated. Victor’s internal conflict revolves around the push and pull of the family and his undying need for freedom. While the former indicates the push factors of migration, the latter points to a more individual source of angst that makes western countries attractive to migrants and vagabonds like Victor. At various instances he muses over his mother’s absence, afraid that she has forgotten him. He longs to see his kid brother Luani but at the same time loathes the enclosure of Vlorë where he always ‘goes crazy’. Nevertheless he crosses back and forth illegally, unlike Fuad and Omer, who follow the necessary legal channels. In contrast to Fuad and Omer, Victor appears chiefly in Christos’s apartment in narrow frontal framing, highlighting passivity rather than active mobility. His travels across borders are the material of stories that he discloses to Christos in impassioned monologues which may be as exaggerated as his predatory masculinity. The image of Magellan, pertinent as it seems to Victor’s persona, may well be wishful thinking. This embellishes his character with additional ambiguity rather than essential truth, which

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is characteristic of queer masculinities and cinematic rebels who often experience gender conflict and existential angst.24 On the surface, Victor appears as a ‘tough guy’ but this is typically a disguise. Arguably, Victor is a romantic hero reminiscent of the hopeless and hapless yet charming romantics that Jean Gabin embodies in Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows/ Quai des Brumes (1938) or Daybreak/Le Jour se Lève (1939): a marginal anti-hero and vagabond who cares only for short-term goals.25 In transnational renditions of the prototype, these cinematic icons are hybridised and in See You particularly Victor is the sum of all but with a degree of veracity that corresponds to the lived difficulties and transitory lives of (Albanian) immigrants and the documentary aesthetics of Korras and Voupouras’s social realism. Victor is a rebel who resists classification. In a unique article to address See You in some depth, Alex Lykidis writes that ‘Victor’s criminal recalcitrance does not conform to liberal constructions of the model immigrant’,26 underscoring the film’s radical departure from the majority of migration films and the pitfalls of positive stereotypes. This is also particularly true for Eduart Bako in Angeliki Antoniou’s Eduart. What’s more, both men detest the notion of work, which Victor mentions to Christos: Mother says, ‘He doesn’t like work, so what is he doing in Greece?’ I love Mother very much but you know what she will say if she sees me? ‘Everyone has sent a refrigerator to their families in Vlorë, why haven’t you?’

In their mixed disposition towards work and the dominant model of the Albanian breadwinner, Victor and Eduart contradict the patriarchal reasoning of Albanian migration and the Greek nation which sees in the Albanian a subordinate guest-worker. As a working body, Eduart fails to conform to obvious expectations while Victor often schemes with his corrupt Greek boss and tampers with his passport in Christos’s apartment. Eduart frequents the underground gay bars of Athens with other Albanian male prostitutes. This constitutes a break from the dominant trend of Albanian migrant employment and is a challenge to the orthodoxy of Albanian and Greek male identity since neither has ‘what it takes to be a man’. Eduart’s stay in Greece is interrupted when he is violently expelled. His return to Albania marks the homecoming of an unworthy son to the Albanian home where we see the Albanian paterfamilias, Raman Bako, a retired officer of the Hoxha regime. Without any hint of surprise, he sarcastically remarks, ‘You finally remembered you’ve got a family?’ He accuses Eduart of stealing his mother’s cash register at the local train

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station: ‘Who taught you to steal and lie? Me or your mother you scum?’ He then attacks Eduart, who grabs his arm and answers ‘You can’t beat me the way you used to. You are not an officer anymore giving orders.’ The argument ends with a declaration of Bako’s principles: ‘I don’t want thieves in my house. Get lost.’ The erratic movement of the handheld camera in the scene paints the household as a space of confrontation between the old order and Albania’s disenfranchised youth. Represented partially in the family enclosure, Eduart is not only a rebel but a teenage delinquent – the bad seed of the family. His antisocial behaviour, quite contrary to the charming Victor, posits him within the category of the self-destructive, inarticulate and emotionally deprived teenager: He grunts, scowls, lashes out, provokes fist-fights and generally acts like a rebel. These features appear moreover as symptoms of anomie which enrich the notion of a futile rebellion as an indication of emotional and existential angst. For both Victor and Eduart, their motivations are elusive, as is their true persona. The military ranking of Raman Bako implies that he is an officer of a domestic totalitarian regime. The scene functions as a representation of familial principles on a national scale – the home as nation metaphor featuring prominently. One can argue that Eduart was forced to leave not by the instability that governed Albania in the 1990s, and thus for work, but by the unrivalled power of patriarchy. Here, as in Hostage, the Albanian home is portrayed as a straitjacket, a concept which seems to define representations of Albania and Albanian family at home and the diaspora. The family’s hierarchical structure is displayed in the first shot of the interior: at the entrance hanging by the wall is the officer’s jacket with three medals pinned to it. Hierarchy in the family and nation is even more apparent in Eduart’s dream in the prison infirmary. Raman Bako appears beside Eduart’s bed dressed in full military attire. Seen from a low camera angle, he appears intimidating and imposing, with his lips shown in an extreme close-up as though inconceivable in the frame. Eduart introduces him to the ward: ‘Gentlemen may I present the honourable commander of the 6th division of the People’s Army, the fallen eagle of the Balkans, Raman Bako in person.’ They all chant ‘Long live the Party, long live Raman Bako!’ He then slaps Eduart in anger. The film thus establishes a clear connection between patriarchy and Eduart’s delinquency. While Eduart seemed set on rock stardom, one may additionally argue that he fled merely for the sake of leaving. This desire emerges when Eduart is taken to prison. The scene serves as a short musical interlude. As Eduart is transported, memories of leisure time with his friends in a

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rundown building pretending to play rap music are intercut. The song’s lyrics underline a profound longing for escape: I wanna go away, go any place! Any place, yeah, any place! Doesn’t matter where you go, as long as it is far, far away . . . yeah, doesn’t matter where you go . . . [. . .] just go far away, doesn’t matter where.

Considering that border-crossing was banned in communist Albania, Eduart’s sudden departure shows a different approach to the mainstream understanding of Albanian migration as fuelled by push factors linked to the union and survival of the family. Eduart’s rebellion, then, differs from Victor’s in the push and pull factors of migration. While Victor maintains emotional ties to his mother and home, Eduart is entirely detached from his Albanian household, assuming the role of a teenage runaway. The migrant imagination is revealed in a flashback from high school years, when he would listen to Greek rock radio with his sister Natasha by a river. He announces that when he graduates he will leave and go ‘anywhere, wherever there’s rock music’. The conversation underscores Eduart’s deluded image of the cliché rock star, in other words the kind of information that flows from the West through the ‘Iron Curtain’ in an age of increasing interconnectedness. Natasha believes that nowhere else can one find ‘such a beautiful river’, which is enough to keep her at home. Eduart replies ‘What do you want a river for when you can have a pool?’ This scene challenges the Eurocentric imagination, which deems Albania a no man’s land and Europe an impenetrable Eldorado. Despite obvious financial and sociopolitical difficulties in 1990s Albania, there is room to imagine a content Albanian at home. Moreover, this is the unique moment when an Albanian migrant is imagined as a body, and mind, for entertainment and popular art, not manual labour. Eduart’s deluded faith in capitalism is manifested in another flashback: with his companions, he crosses the mountains to Greece and they assume they are on the other side the moment Eduart stumbles on a Pepsi can, which incites mass cheering. It seems as though an over-idealised lifestyle of consumerism and commoditisation is the rubric of the migrant imagination. The film drives the futility of Eduart’s imagination deeper, since his flashbacks are inserted during his incarceration. In this respect, Eduart bears some similarities to Elion’s tragically misguided armed rebel. Eduart remains insubordinate in prison and fights other inmates, facing severe punishment at every turn. The pinnacle of the disobedience/ punishment trajectory is rape by another inmate. So, to some extent,

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Eduart is represented through a moralistic lens since his rebelliousness and dreams of stardom are met by judicial punishment and the migrant imagination is the vehicle of suffering. Despite his rebelliousness, Eduart is brought back into the fold of victimhood and patriarchy, which is conveyed as a gross expression of male dominance similar to Elion’s rape, making his body a vessel of repressed anger. It does, however, set the stage for the liberating finale as Eduart will have to choose between revenge and forgiveness.

Redemption, Reconciliation, Transformation In the final scenes of Eduart, armed insurgents break into the prison and Eduart escapes with his ally, the fatally wounded doctor. When he tells Eduart the story of Faust who ‘sold his soul to the devil’, Eduart reflects on the possibility of his own redemption. The final flashback, inserted strategically at this dramatic climax, demonstrates the critical moment when Eduart killed a man in Athens, revealing an essential cause for his internal plight. By displaying the murder scene at the end of this journey, following a chain of events that led to this crucial moment, Eduart is presumably redeemed. Redemption is, moreover, the outcome of the harshness of prison life and his mentorship by the German doctor, who becomes a surrogate father and, as a doctor, a caring figure. In the infirmary, Eduart confronts death, loss and regret and learns to value human life, especially after he is told to care for one of his assailants. A vital moment on his course to redemption is his unexpected decision to save the wounded and vulnerable rapist during the violent uprising. Eduart’s valiant act breaks with the norms of prison films that feature male rape, as the rapist is usually killed in acts of retribution that reassert male order.27 As an example of transnational cinema, Eduart blurs certain generic features that revolve around the religious concept of a bodily and spiritual calvary which is often assigned to the prison film genre and depictions of prison-life. In many examples, sexual assault is paradoxically essential to the prisoner’s rehabilitation.28 In this respect, the film’s evocation of redemption and rehabilitation is faithful to the notion that bodily suffering, among other factors, can transform the prisoner/migrant subject. The film’s reliance, however, on spiritual redemption is also pertinent to a narrative akin to Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped/Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), especially because Bresson, like Antoniou, utilised prison as a metaphor for the cage of the soul and place for spiritual and emotional contemplation. The former achieves this through an evocative use of silence while Antoniou, relying more on narrative than authorial

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expression, inserts flashbacks into Eduart’s prison time. Redemption becomes, most importantly, an overarching theme that implicates Greece and Albania, beyond the confines of the soul. Eduart must now surrender to the Greek authorities. At the border, he collapses face down in the snow after days of walking. A group of soldiers revive him and Eduart confesses to murder. In the next shot, Natasha stands by the old cherry tree in the village, now in full bloom. While blossoming trees may be a rather overused and schematic metaphor, the tree does serve an important function here since it allows us to imagine anew the Greek–Albanian border, redeemed from xenophobic discourse, which is inextricably linked to the turbulence of Albania’s interim period. The film proceeds from a national narrative to a transnational, at the meeting point of two rival nations. Eduart’s trajectory of redemption traces the changes in Albania in the 1990s and the turmoil in his soul reflects the turmoil in an entire country in the course of a grand transformation. By screening Albanian insurgents and weapon smugglers in tandem with Eduart’s transformative trajectory, Antoniou refutes the sweeping logic of Albanophobia. The film thus poses a test to Greek audiences by proposing forgiveness and rapprochement between both countries. Eduart demands a new language of belonging that transcends borders as it adheres to theorisations of transnational film scholarship: it deals implicitly with nations in transition, at the very meeting point where cultures meet and difference emerges. Eduart merges Europe with one of its ‘Others’, establishing cultural exchange across tangible and metaphorical borders, redeeming this exchange from totalities that transform migration into an appeal to Europe’s centrality. While Antoniou does not propose a different entity than the nation (after all, the film is predominantly about a nation) she leaves her audience at the in-between from where new rationales of human interaction can develop and from where Eduart can redefine himself, without Albanian custom or Albanophobia. Eduart delivers redemption but See You tracks a more composed understanding of reconciliation. In the city of Vlorë, Christos discovers unresolved antagonisms between himself and the Albanian companions. During his stay with Fuad’s family, Christos observes the persistence of patriarchy as an indication of the dominance of conservative tradition over modernisation. In the film, Albanian hospitality is governed by stringent conditions that contest his position as he becomes the apple of discord in a family feud which unsettles Christos’s leftist ideology and awakens his dormant sense of nationhood. He first fulfils his promise to visit Victor’s mother, after which he is confronted by Fuad’s mother, a domineering matron who arrives at the

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doorstep in a fury: Where did you head off to? What if someone mugged you? You should not have left without saying something. Fuad’s father spells out the conditions of hospitality: ‘You are my guest and I have to guarantee for you so that if someone kills you I die. At this time there are many criminals on the street.’ The father’s words display the deep roots of male and familial honour that figure in the code of Besa.29 According to Albanian folklore tradition, Besa is the promise a host offers to a stranger in need of protection. The notion of protection, besides from the paternalistic aspect of hospitality, underlines the lasting prejudice of Balkan lawlessness. Fuad’s father articulates this very custom, which for him is a cherished token of his very own exclusive understanding of generosity towards a stranger. Since hospitality functions as a contract, Christos is guest to only one family, for which he will procure Greek visas. In the same respect, the code of honour requires that Christos has only one friend and obtains a visa for only one family, as Fuad scornfully remarks: ‘Here we have one friend, not two.’ Acquiring visas for the whole family means, moreover, that Christos is in return treated ‘like their own child’, a phrase which both Fuad’s and Victor’s mother express in an attempt to claim possession of Christos. In the few days spent in Vlorë, the tension between the two families escalates, transforming hospitality into an uncomfortable coexistence. After the visit to Victor’s mother, Fuad forcefully declares the conditions of hospitality: ‘Neither I nor the family like what you are doing. You choose Victor over me.’ The function of Albanian custom is a given that cannot be overlooked, especially in Albania. Arguably, Christos’s western values have little merit in a household and nation that are founded on entirely different customs and values. See You, however, does not deem Albanian custom as backward but as a form of societal organisation clearly different from western liberal models. Despite its conditions, the Albanian household is hospitable. Fuad’s family offers Christos shelter, gifts and a place at the dinner table with the men as ‘one of us’. While there is of course an obvious angle to this treatment, it is not devoid of kindness, which moreover is displayed according to a collective trust in conservative custom. Conditional hospitality is a natural function and an appropriate response, according to the shared beliefs of the Albanian hosts. It is the Albanian way. Difference thus unsettles totalities. It is this very exclusive form of hospitality that Jacques Derrida questions, without considering the spectrum of cultural difference in relation to displays of hospitality, particularly in parts of the world that have not experienced western modernity and its reliance on reason and neoliberalism.

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The confrontation between Fuad and Christos happens in a fatalistic manner, highlighting that, inevitably, certain differences are irreconcilable. According to Christos Voupouras, Christos hopes to discover something in Albania, an authenticity and romantic view. Yet, a conflict is inevitable. When you travel carrying in your luggage a European humanism, it is not easy to survive in Albania. It is a hard place with strict rules. Christos believes in freedom of choice. This does not exist in Albania. So he clashes with the traditional values of Albanians and realizes that conforming to these values is the moral fibre that keeps this society unified. But he cannot do so. He manages however to come to terms with his own society.30

As though putting together all the landscapes of his journey, Christos contemplates his identity in a world where freedom of choice is not a given. So he makes the conscious decision to accept his daughter’s Christian name, Anna, and comes to terms with the national essentialisms that have been ‘burnt on our skin’ as he declares in an impassioned monologue. Keeping with the theme of redemption from self-loathing, Christos accepts that Greeks live within and not outside religion and patriarchy. Doksa says so in a heated dialogue about Anna’s christening, a ceremony which Christos deems a ‘violation of the spirit’: ‘Everyone here is just fine being violated. Maybe you should do something about it.’ Christos accepts, in other words, that all these features constitute his identity regardless of his marginality in Greek society. In Stuart Hall’s words, ‘not the so-called return to roots, but a coming-to-terms-with our “routes”’.31 For Lykidis, Christos’s transformation at first undermines xenophilia and hierarchises ‘the differential responses to postcommunist modernization in the Balkans’. However, Christos’s undying thirst for cultural exchange and continued friendship with the rebel Victor complicates any direct explanation of motivations and showcases the Balkan affiliations of Greek identity which are perpetually at odds with western liberalism.32 Christos’s continued outsider status and connection to various Albanians who orbit Victor, petty criminals and antisocial teens, underscores the precarious position of Greece in Europe and the Balkans. What’s more, Christos appears holding his daughter closely, revealing a shift in his attitude to family that is emphasised when, after his trip, Christos visits his estranged father. However, Christos, still refers to his daughter as Rosa, after the Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg. Christos becomes aware of his Greekness when, without any immediate warning, he takes the side of the Ethnic Greek in Albania whom Fuad attacks over an argument about visas. All along, his sense of national belonging has been lying dormant. But it has been there within him. This

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is the crux of the message: we are not what we choose to be but what has been branded upon us by superior forces. Hall has understood this in his meditations on cultural representation: ‘[Representation] is possible only because enunciation is always produced within codes that have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time’.33 The film additionally implies that to be on good terms with the ‘Other’, one needs to be so with his/her own people. In this respect, Christos’s xenophilia has been entirely misguided, appearing as a utopian projection of multiculturalism rather than a genuine understanding and acceptance of cultural difference. As though recasting Homi Bhabha’s dictum that it is impossible to live with difference, Korras and Voupouras underscore the transformative capacity of cultural difference, its power to shatter totalities and hierarchies. Before Christos can fully accept his Albanians friends, he needs to be open to the entire spectrum of difference. See You renegotiates the terms of the violent encounter between Greeks and Albanian ‘Others’ by underlining the significance of relationships that provide the opportunity to discover one’s self, since identities mean very little in isolation. The ‘Other’, however, must not be seen as a projection of the self but as a separate culture, and this is what the film succeeds in showing. Only then ‘will [it] be possible to confront and modify more basic cultural emotions (fears and anxieties) and to recognize the other as a culture apart [. . .]. On this basis, reciprocity becomes feasible, and it will be possible to display empathy, concern and responsibility in the cultural relationship’.34 At the sombre finale, Victor departs to an unknown destination longing for a change that never seems to come. The bird’s-eye shot of Christos in a square is characteristic of the loneliness and confusion that each character inevitably experiences, since ephemeral friendly encounters are a feature of journeys. According to Korras, ‘The journey is the encounter with the “Other: and love [eros] is the thirst for the journey of social contact.’35 This adventure has brought Christos back to where he started – in search of human contact. He calls out ‘mirupafshim’ but Victor is already out of frame, emphasising Christos’s solitude. Contrary to Eduart, transformation in See You is not met with elation, especially since Victor continues to suffer from self-loathing, simultaneously rejecting and longing for home. Conversely, Fuad is the only character to entirely transform. Korras, however, mentions that ‘Fuad wears his identity like a hide’.36 According to this metaphor, Fuad adopts and discards identities with ease. This strategy is essential for his survival in the social sphere. He appears as an endearing companion but in reality his love is de facto conditional and operates on the code of Besa, which is an essential mandate of the Kanun,

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the canon of social and familial order passed down to generations for centuries. The film’s comprehensive rhetoric tells us that Fuad’s identity has been etched onto his skin. Indeed, in Albania, there is great pressure to conform to patriarchal custom which, from Christos’s bewildered point of view, is a cause for separation. Although it is consistent with the film’s inclusive and uncompromising approach to identity and liberal notions of multiculturalism, Fuad’s sudden U-turn leaves little room for anything else: Fuad is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’; he is an Albanian patriarch. This is an unfortunate setback for a film that aims to radically challenge dominant perceptions of Albanian and Greek identity. Calotychos has criticised this unexpected turnaround, as it essentialises Albanian identity and rehashes Greek national sentiments, especially since after his journey Christos visits his own parents—a symbolic gesture on the reallocation of Christos in the Greek patriarchal family and its values.37 In closing, the film’s third chapter, entitled Victor, places the focus on the directors’ preferred version of the migrant as an elusive and charismatic vagabond by essentialising Fuad. In other words, Victor is placed on a pedestal because he retains his elusive charm, which depends on the allure of his mysterious personality, while Fuad has shown his true colours. The major cause for this one-sided portrayal can be traced to the film’s mode of address: See You tells viewers more about the lessons a Greek man gains from the encounter with Albanians, not the other way around. While the Greek man has changed, the Albanian reveals himself in his essential version. This is an inevitable consequence of the film’s national mode of address. Indeed, despite transnational aspirations, Korras and Voupouras’s film is a national film addressed primarily to Greeks emerging out of the experience of Greeks who take part in the encounter from, inevitably, a hegemonic point of view. In the same way, before a Greek film can be seen by audiences and classified by scholars as European or transnational it first has to be national.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Bhabha (1983), p. 18. Bhabha’s emphasis. Ibid., p. 1. Triandafyllidou (1999), p. 197. Baldwin-Edwards (2004), p. 52. Konstantinidou (2001), p. 102. Ibid., p. 104. Hall (1997), p. 249. Bhabha (1983), p. 19.

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9. Loshitzky (2010), p. 2. 10. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 11. For more on actual incidents involving Albanian students, see Tzanelli (2006), pp. 27–49. 12. Hall (1996b), pp. 4–5. 13. Maragoudakis, Agis (1998), ‘Christos Voupouras–Yorgos Korras, “Miroupafsim: monopati avtognosias”’ [‘Christos Voupouras–Yorgos Korras, “Mirupafshim: a path of self-knowledge”’], in Rizospastis, 1 March. 14. Prosehos (1998). 15. Maragoudakis (1998). 16. Derrida (2000a). 17. Rutherford (1990), p. 208. 18. Personal interview with Yorgos Korras, August 2011. 19. Maragoudakis (1998). 20. Žižek (2016), p. 81. 21. Eleftheriotis (2010), p. 99. 22. Bauman (1996), p. 28. 23. Laclau and Mouffe (1989), p. 19. 24. Mitchell (2005), p. 133. 25. Marie (2003), p. 106. 26. Lykidis (2015), p. 356. 27. Farmer (2008), p. 111. 28. See for example the rape of Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) in American History X (Kaye 1998), which frees him of racism and Nazi ideology. 29. Papailias (2003), p. 1067. 30. Prosehos (1998). 31. Hall (1996b), p. 4. 32. Lykidis (2015), p. 357. 33. Hall (1996a), p. 168. 34. Robins (1996), p. 79. 35. Personal interview with Yorgos Korras, August 2011. 36. Ibid. 37. Calotychos (2013), p. 169.

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C HA PT ER 6

Others/Mirrors

The four case studies discussed in this chapter address the otherness of Greeks through encounters with migrants and refugees. The latter are imagined as the prototypical agents of non-belonging who reflect the otherness of a Greek protagonist who, unable to articulate or come to terms with his alienation, discovers the stranger within him through the encounter, rendering him a more responsible individual. This implies atoning for racist crimes, becoming more accepting of multiculturalism or providing humanitarian aid. Unable to represent Greekness, Greek filmmakers have resorted to the ‘Other’ as mirror, revealing an overall crisis in representation which is however not restricted exclusively to Greek cinema. It is characteristic of wider trends in post-1989 European cinema which has showcased an ever-growing fascination with migration in an attempt to illustrate a wider crisis of identity that has occurred as a result of major changes to the continent’s demographic makeup. In this chapter, the reader is asked to take under consideration the fact that films made by representatives of the host nation often narrate the encounter with a migrant ‘Other’ from an indigenous point of view, consequently reproducing hegemonic binaries in the dynamic between Greek protagonist and migrant ‘Other’. There are very few neutral binary oppositions since one pole of the binary inevitably includes the other within its field of operation.1 The four case studies are problematic in the way they handle the relationship between a Greek protagonist and disenfranchised migrant: Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos 1998) takes at its core the last days of a Greek poet who regains courage through the encounter with a refugee boy who had to leave his burning village in Northern Epirus during the fall of the Hoxha regime in Albania. In Plato’s Academy (Tsitos 2009) a bitter working-class man comes to terms with his sad existence through a tense and tragically funny encounter with an Albanian economic migrant. The alienated captain of Man at Sea (Giannaris 2011) tries to rekindle his dying marriage through various failed attempts to take a group of refugees aboard his tanker to safety and

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in Correction (Anastopoulos 2008) a Greek ex-convict seeks the forgiveness of an Albanian woman for murdering her husband. Unlike accented films, the proposed case studies deal with the trials and tribulations of Greek protagonists while the migrant ‘Other’ maintains a peripheral role at all times, thus reinforcing the marginal location of migrants and refugees in Fortress Europe. The migrant or refugee appears as a tragic outsider whose displacement reflects that of Greeks in the age of globalisation and multiculturalism. This chapter thus elaborates further on Vrasidas Karalis’s assertion, which poignantly captures the political underpinning of Greek migration cinema: It is almost as though the Greek experience has lost its right to be represented; or even as though contemporary Greek directors refuse to deal with the Greek experience and use the mirror of the immigrant in order to depict the crisis of meaning, authority and purpose that seems to dominate social life, without ever admitting that they themselves are the immigrants we see on screen, strangers in their own land.2

Similarly, Yosefa Loshitzky captures a wider crisis of identity in European films: My choice to discuss mostly hegemonic rather than minority/diasporic/migrant films is related to my attempt to explore the crisis of European identity through the emerging dominant discourse of anxiety regarding its new strangers and others within. Nowhere are these anxieties better articulated than in cinema, which both reflects and constructs societal attitudes [. . .].3

The hierarchy of the relationship in the proposed case studies requires careful unpacking as it conceals hegemonic power structures. Loshitzky’s preference for the term ‘hegemonic’ is a constant reminder that the exploration of the said crisis inevitably requires that the non-European migrant or refugee is positioned on the second pole of the binary. In addition though, otherness operates as a panacea for the protagonist’s emotional plight, in other words adopting otherness. Adopting the migrant’s otherness or simply recognising our inherent otherness is seen by scholars as a necessary move towards assuming the moral responsibility of the white European towards the migrant ‘Other’. Julia Kristeva has argued that in order to understand and embrace the ‘Other’, it is necessary first to embrace the foreigner in us4 while Zygmunt Bauman invites his readers to immerse themselves in feelings extraneous to identity.5 Only through such frameworks of estrangement can barriers collapse and togetherness be facilitated. Albert Memmi argues that ‘to relate positively to another [. . .] one needs to abandon oneself to the other to an extent and identify

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with him or her. The stranger will not be acquitted until one succeeds in adopting him or her. Without that, the outsider’s opacity and recalcitrant autonomy remain irksome, disturbing’.6 Abandoning the self and embracing the stranger within us, all in all vague conceptualisations, is a privileged move which neglects the structural and political factors that turn a sovereign citizen into a refugee, migrant and ‘Other’. Concepts such as ‘foreigner’ and ‘stranger’ contain multiple connotations; thus one needs to unpack their cultural and sociopolitical baggage, which differs across the spectrum of class, race, gender and ethnicity. Otherness thus functions as a therapeutic commodity for the protagonist’s alienation and a means to bettering a lacking conscience. Bettering of the Greek protagonist often involves a guilty conscience occurring as a result of the host society’s indifference to the plight of migrants and refugees. By acknowledging his inherent otherness and taking thus a paternalistic stand – often involving saving and protecting migrants in need – the Greek protagonist poses the kind of humanitarian values that are central to European identity. Correction, Eternity and a Day, Plato’s Academy and Man at Sea illustrate the moral dilemma that Greece and Europe are currently faced with as they evoke the encounter in search of an appropriate response to the burning question of hospitality that the migrant’s presence commands. In order to achieve this though, the films posit that one needs to acknowledge and embrace one’s own inherent otherness, mirrored by the migrant or refugee. Through the encounter, the Greek protagonist and spectator search for an adequate response, rendering them more responsible and caring citizens.

Otherness as Atonement: Correction In Correction, ‘overcompensation’ and voluntary victimisation appear as symptoms of ‘border syndrome’ in the life of a Greek ex-convict, Yorgos Simeoforidis. The film opens with his release from prison, where he was sentenced for the murder of an Albanian fan during the 2004 match between the national football teams of Greece and Albania. The ensuing violent clashes in several locations across the country exposed the infiltration of football clubs by clandestine extreme-right militias.7 Thanos Anastopoulos takes a real-life event as a springboard to ‘correct’ the discrimination and violence committed against Albanian immigrants and highlights the intolerance of the Greek ethos. He achieves this by reversing the hierarchy of belonging, placing his Greek protagonist in the position of precarious border subject who appears as an Albanian avatar.

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Like a modern-day pariah, Yorgos aimlessly wanders the city of Athens after his release. Anastopoulos portrays Yorgos’s persistent drifting while we often identify with his gaze, stumble in his path and stare into mirrors, as in the opening scene where he washes his face before his release – a first indication of the need to wash himself of his sins. Atonement is performed as Yorgos remains silent and stern-faced, alluding to the silence of atonement and a plea for penitence. Throughout the film, we witness the gradual and absolute triumph of ‘border syndrome’ over the body of Yorgos, who exemplifies the features that are stereotypically associated with Albanian migrants: he works like a ‘slave’, processes the loathing of other people in isolation, willingly descends into homelessness and takes several beatings by grotesque nationalists as though manifesting the host society’s intolerance. Yorgos thus embodies the misfortunes that throw migrants into a permanent state of crisis as an integral feature of the Albanian’s experience of exile in Greece. It is hoped that, by witnessing this transformation through an indigenous Greek, audiences will also atone for what is perceived as a collective infliction of border syndrome on Albanian migrants. At first, Yorgos exhibits the stereotypical fears of Greeks towards Albanians. In order though to identify with him, he needs to be absolved of criminality. For this purpose, Anastopoulos utilises flashbacks which reveal how Yorgos was actually brainwashed by his former gang of nationalist hooligans and that he is actually a ‘good’ Greek, a victim of racist rhetoric. Anastopoulos portrays the stereotype of an Albanian criminal only to reinforce the ideal image of the migrant ‘Other’ who ‘overcompensates’ since, as he mentions to Panayotis, the Albanian restaurant owner, he will do ‘whatever they tell him to do’, as though upturning the stereotype. Interestingly, while Yorgos departs from one correction facility, he ventures on the same mission within a fragmented city lined with fences, railings and barred gates. Fragmentation is a dominant feature, as the city is characterised by grotesque and alienating architecture while editing is abrupt and without a sense of continuity, camera angles are often unsettling and the film is repeatedly shot through distorting lenses. Dialogue is sparse and often cut very suddenly. The frame itself is tightly knit and vexed by an architecture of aggression within which the potential of rapprochement seems unattainable. At the same time, ideological barriers, fundamental expressions of Greekness, create separate alliances: a national commemoration parade sees Ornela, his victim’s widow, and Yorgos on opposite sidewalks staring ominously at the other side. Yorgos wanders in the night during the Good Friday funeral procession at Syntagma Square where the notorious Archbishop Christodoulos, who was openly against secularism, gives a speech on the treasure of Christian faith that ‘constitutes our identity’. On one side of

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the parade Yorgos stands stern-faced looking across the street, from where his former comrades stare back. While atonement and sorrow reverberate through the sombre procession, the deep roots of nationalism figure as integral features of Greekness. Concurrently, the Greek flag is taken out of its national and symbolic context and portrayed as a commodity and vessel of hatred. It adorns the headquarters of the nationalists and is literally a murder weapon. It is also painted on Yorgos’s face, ‘a carnivalesque mask of horror that Yorgos carries as a caricature of Greekness’.8 Miniature flags are placed over kebabs at the stadium cantina as the national anthem plays in the background and plastic flags are sold in the streets. The flag is finally incorporated in Yorgos’s surname, ‘Simeoforidis’, which translates as flag-bearer. By reversing the established meaning allocated to the national symbol, Anastopoulos forces Greek audiences to re-evaluate their true meaning. Yorgos frequents a halfway house, bread queues, seeks work at immigration centres and is targeted by nationalists. Now, he is their victim. At the same time, he performs tasks traditionally assigned to Albanian ‘slaves’: domestic cleaning and manual labour in the Albanian household and restaurant. By allocating to him roles typically assigned to Albanian migrants, Anastopoulos forces viewers to imagine the humiliation Albanians have endured. The physical abuse he endures is the culmination of this suffering. His tenacious struggle to ‘become’ Albanian unravels and brings greater exclusion. The line of events that transform Yorgos is based on the lasting notion that atonement requires undergoing a calvary of physical and spiritual torment. Yorgos endures bodily suffering and eruptive violence as though illustrating the real trials and tribulations of Albanian immigrants. Several sequences are suggestive of a need to reject Greekness. Ornela’s apartment, facing the Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium, a haven for nationalists and hooligans, is ‘invaded’ by Yorgos, who makes his way to her front door, lurking in the dark corridor. All of a sudden, the power is cut and Ornela opens the door, where Yorgos waits. He walks in with a steady pace and shuts the door. He is not asking for hospitality, but obtaining it by force, encapsulating the fears of the Greeks who foresee an Albanian ‘invasion’ in their homes. Calotychos suitably observes that ‘the scene’s stalker aspect is purposefully excessive, magnifying [Yorgos’s] surrogate Albanian pariah status in Greek society’.9 The excess of Yorgos’s stalker status highlights the excess and absurdity of xenophobia since Yorgos is, in fact, harmless. The sinister atmosphere is quickly reversed into a darkly comic scene where Yorgos performs the tasks most often assigned to Albanian female domestic cleaners.10 He turns on the lights and the scene cuts to a bathroom, where he repairs a

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Figure 6.1 Yorgos finally manages to ‘break into’ Ornela’s apartment in Correction (Anastopoulos 2008).

broken washing machine. Calotychos observes that ‘[t]he scene is comic and parodic in a number of ways [. . .]. The mood turns quite literally with the flick of a switch, as Yorgos provides technical assistance and transforms the scene from the thriller genre to domestic everydayness’.11 On the rooftop, Yorgos hangs the laundry while Ornela exposes his ‘dirty laundry’: referring to the demands of her husband’s extended family, she mentions that ‘they are asking for his bones, but I want to leave them here where he chose to live, for as long as you allowed him to’. This is the first instance in which atonement and rapprochement are upset by the intrusive memory of the trauma inflicted by Greekness and in which a new collective memory is shaped, based on grief for the death of the ‘Other’. This is further highlighted by the Good Friday funeral procession that follows this sequence. After the procession, Yorgos receives a beating in his makeshift corner. Before leaving, the nationalists insert a mobile phone into his mouth on which the recorded murder video replays. The (recorded) flashback reminds us ‘where Yorgos used to be and where he is now’ as the gang-leader tells him. Anastopoulos saves the murder for the end so as to encourage a compassionate response to the Greek ‘Other’. Ornela finds the beaten Yorgos, who in the next shot lies in bed next to her. She discovers the video of her partner’s murder. The traumatic memory, permanently stored in digital form, is a recorded testimony of Greekness as an uncanny and grotesque display of nationalism.12 The pervading silence is broken by the resounding slogan: ‘You will never

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become Greek, you bloody Albanian.’ Once again, the space of atonement is transformed into a site of struggle where the traumatising display of Greekness is replayed. We are thus transferred to the crime scene. In the dark alleyway leading to the stadium, Yorgos prepares for battle, standing opposite the Albanian fans. We follow him, perched on his shoulder. The Albanian mob runs away but one man stumbles on the stairs. The scene echoes the grandiosity and terror of the massacre on the Odessa steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Yorgos, his face painted white and blue, beats his opponent with the flag post. We gaze simultaneously at the killing, helpless, and then identify with Yorgos’s viewpoint. He stares at the camera as though gazing at Ornela and, implicitly, the audience. Genuine rapprochement may be ultimately unattainable but, through the flashback, Yorgos is forgiven as his ‘true colours’ are not the flag’s. From the performance of (Greek) nationalism, we observe that of forgiveness. In the permeating silence, Ornela lifts a pair of scissors as Yorgos lies in bed eyes wide open. Instead of killing him though, she proceeds to clean his wounds. The scene cuts to the interior of a bus driving past a cemetery where, on her lap, Ornela holds an ossuary box containing her partner’s bones, performing a therapeutic act as though restoring the Albanian nation. The next scene takes us back to the apartment where Yorgos sits on the bed, his back turned to Savvina (Ornela’s daughter), who turns to look at him – a gesture he cannot return. The film’s closing sequence is reminiscent of the final sequence of Eclipse/ L’Eclisse (Antonioni 1962), known for its permeating deadpan silence, fleeting sounds and empty streets, interiors and grotesque architecture. Here, a handheld camera closes up to the barred gate of the school then descends an empty staircase while in the distance fleeting sounds pass by. Five different still shots display the scenery of rooftops, railings, gates and an empty class room. Through a narrow crack in the wall, Savvina stares at the camera. Cut then to the balcony where Ornela gazes through the window. At the corner of the sidewalk, Yorgos walks into the bustling street and disappears from view. In the end, the overriding silence and separation postpone the possibility of a surrogate family, at least until a new language of togetherness is created to overcome the trauma of nationalism. Correction has thus achieved a haunting display of Greek nationalism, pleading for a radically new language. The film’s protagonist embraces otherness in order to advocate atonement and silence as the necessary response to Albanian immigrants. Interestingly, the film’s title is a reminder that the crimes against Albanians in Greece cannot be corrected although forgiveness is not unreachable. At the same time though, by

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reversing the hierarchy of otherness, the film achieves little in promoting a radical representation of migrants and belonging, an issue highlighted by Stuart Hall in his writing on Black Cinema: ‘you can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject’.13 In conclusion, Correction essentialises the experience of Albanian migrants in Greece. Although the story of the restaurant owner, Panayotis, offers a more nuanced interpretation of diasporic identity without the suffering of embodied protest, our attention is on Yorgos, positing Panayotis as peripheral to the narrative.

Otherness as ‘Matter out of Place’: Plato’s Academy In Plato’s Academy, hospitality sequences serve as the backdrop to the bewilderment of a working-class hero and Greek nationalist par excellence, Stavros, whose life is overturned by his encounter with the Albanian Marenglen. Bewilderment functions as the fabric of satire and occurs when difference unsettles established hierarchies. Considering this, the film portrays an understanding of the Albanian ‘Other’ as ‘matter out of place’. According to Hall, ‘What unsettles culture is “matter out of place” – the breaking of our unwritten rules and codes. Dirt in the garden is fine, but dirt in one’s bedroom is “matter out of place” – a sign of pollution, of symbolic boundaries being transgressed, of taboos broken.’14 In Plato’s Academy, Marenglen unsettles the order of the home which functions metaphorically as sovereign nation. ‘Matter out of place’ applies particularly to Stavros, who finds himself to be out of place: he is forced to host Marenglen, who moves into his house when Stavros’s demented mother, who all of a sudden speaks Albanian, sees in Marenglen her alleged lost son. Mother’s joy in Marenglen’s visit is such that it obliges Stavros to let him in. Her dementia nevertheless heralds the film’s ending and moral message since she ultimately acts on her dementia. Marginal subjects become central and encroach on Stavros’s sovereign household, generating an absurd reaction by the confused host. Subversion generates unease masquerading as absurd comedy, alluding to the absurdity and comedy of xenophobia. Stavros epitomises the characteristics of an awkward host, articulating formulaic xenophobic idioms and performing defensive gestures which expose him as a pitiful and familiar Greek racist. Bewilderment characterises the film’s manifold hospitality sequences as Marenglen circulates in and out of the Greek household as a reminder of Stavros’s unresolved struggle to come to terms with the ‘new world order’

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manifest in the public signs of an encroaching globalisation and multiculturalism: the construction of a Chinese second-hand store next to his convenience store and the erection of a cross-cultural solidarity monument in the municipal square. All this happens in the residential neighbourhood of Colonus,15 a small, working-class and neglected quarter of Athens, which Stavros and his company of misfits have claimed as their ‘turf ’ and where they play makeshift football. Hospitality is a provocative concept debated in the public and private space. It becomes thus a dominant narrative device, particularly as Stavros constantly sways between inclusion and exclusion of the migrant, leading to a compromise and the film’s ending. Transnationalism, with its underlying links to international capitalism, is suggestive of hospitality in the public sphere, developing a narrative around the painful acceptance of the ‘new world order’, according to which foreign capital penetrates national borders and foreign bodies are the vehicles of capitalism – those who circulate it and those circulated by capitalism. On the other hand, the plot develops as tension escalates when hospitality becomes a central issue in the domestic sphere, exposing this painful resolution on a personal level. In this respect, Marenglen is a mirror of Stavros’s otherness who, as a vessel of ‘Greekness’ in the months before the 2008 financial crisis, and amongst so many foreigners, suffers from an ‘orphan complex’,16 appearing abandoned, disoriented and, eventually, obsolete. Plato’s Academy addresses the otherness of Greece, a so-called ‘brotherless’ (‘anadelfon’) nation, and in particular ‘the bedraggled “natives” of Athens’.17 The film is centrally about the Greek nation and its ongoing painful transition to a multicultural host society, reinterpreting Karalis’s observation on otherness in contemporary Greek cinema. Stavros’s first encounter with Marenglen exposes the comedy of xenophobia. Stavros, his mother and his friends waste away their days sitting outside Stavros’s corner shop, drinking frappe and mocking the Chinese workers. The dog of one of the friends, Patriot, who has been trained to bark only at Albanians, barks at Marenglen. Immediately the men jump up and proceed to taunt Marenglen like a captured prey. Then Mother startles Stavros as she suddenly shouts ‘Remzi’ towards an equally astonished Marenglen. Later, Stavros comes home and discovers that Mother is cooking. With great anticipation he sets the table only to discover Marenglen seated in the dining room. Stavros stands still, his smile now a confused piercing gaze. This is a foreign invasion loaded with all the stereotypically racist connotations and highlighted as a satirical portrayal of Stavros’s xenophobia. Stavros then discovers the unsettling news – Mother speaks Albanian and Marenglen is his lost brother. Their actual names are Salih

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and Remzi (common names in Mother’s favourite Turkish soap operas and a warning sign of encroaching globalisation). This means that Stavros is Albanian, the mere thought of which fills him with dread and provokes a series of awkward reactions. Marenglen refers to Mother as ‘Mum’ further stoking the rage in Stavros, who gets no answer to his questions: ‘Who is this, Mum? Didn’t I tell you not to open the door to strangers?’ Marenglen stands up but adopts an apprehensive posture. The scene closes as Stavros assertively escorts Marenglen out and closes the door on him. Marenglen displays the features of a stereotypically ‘good’ Albanian. He may have ‘invaded’ the Greek household, yet he barely manages to unsettle the established hierarchy as he remains submissive. This is indicative of the hegemony of binaries in the film, which furthermore serve as a vehicle of comedy: the ‘bad’ Greek comes across as comical due to his exaggerated gestures and idioms, which are so exactly because Marenglen is not a ‘bad’ Albanian. After all, he asked for permission to enter (‘I rang the bell and Mum opened to me’), and has not been welcomed as a stranger, since Mother speaks Albanian. The editing, however, makes Marenglen appear directly within the household, highlighting the fact that he is ‘out of place’, that in other words a boundary has been severely violated. Simultaneously, the editing lays emphasis on Stavros’s sheer bewilderment. The scene is meant to shock Greek audiences, who are expected to feel as unsettled as Stavros. Filippos Tsitos passes judgement on the host through an uneasy comedy. Yet, poetic licence is ridden with bias.

Figure 6.2 Stavros appearing out of place in his own home, in Plato’s Academy (Tsitos 2009).

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The hierarchy of the household has thus been momentarily disturbed since Stavros appears as a foreigner in his own home, where everyone now speaks Albanian. According to Derrida, language is the first condition for hospitality, since one cannot ask for hospitality in an unknown language. Seeing that Mother speaks Albanian, it is not Marenglen who should ask for hospitality, but Stavros. His plight and place in the home are therefore central and function as the crisis that determines the plot and comedy. The next day, while Stavros, Mother and friends sit in their usual corner, Patriot starts barking, heads turn and Stavros stands up, pressing Mother into her seat as though preparing for attack. In the next frame, Marenglen already stands in the shop. This sudden transition, avoiding the actual moment of entry, reinforces yet again the notion of an invasion so sudden that it is unsettling. Marenglen stands stern-faced, silent and motionless in a tight frame, with various goods stacked on either side reinforcing his position as ‘matter out of place’. The features of the ‘good’ Albanian are performed in this short prelude to the next hospitality sequence. The performative elements in the scene are observed through narrow framing that focuses on the gestural quality of movement and stillness, in addition to deadpan facial expressions. When Mother mentions that they will go shopping and have lunch all together, Marenglen looks at Stavros in confusion, his few words highlighting his submissiveness: ‘Can I go?’ His stern expression, still posture and even tone reinforce the performative appeal of the ‘good’ Albanian, to which Stavros responds with a persistently angry expression. The scene’s satirical character depends on this schematic allocation of roles that can be conveyed cohesively through performance: the ‘good’ Albanian asks for permission, while the ‘bad’ Greek lashes back, establishing the comedy of an odd pairing. At this moment, Marenglen turns from construction worker to domestic caretaker and thus an integral feature of the household as he assists Mother on her way to the supermarket. Very soon though Stavros dismisses Marenglen, affirming his role as unethical employer rather than endearing sibling. Stavros comes to terms with the ‘new world order’ with great pain, as shown in the many losses he faces towards the cathartic finale: his ‘tiny turf ’ where the cross-cultural monument is nearly complete and his friends who resolve their bewilderment by selling their corner shops to the Chinese, succumbing to the pleasures of international capitalism. As he prepares for the funeral, the Chinese shop celebrates its opening in the new multicultural neighbourhood. Amongst such sudden and unprecedented changes, Stavros is the ultimate embodiment of otherness. Otherness though should not be understood as a blanket term; Marenglen is a marginal figure with few or no features of belonging, while Stavros

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Figure 6.3 Marenglen appearing out of place in Plato’s Academy (Tsitos 2009).

displays the pathos of Greek working-class heroes and embodies the loneliness of an entire nation. In other words, Stavros owns additional layers of belonging before being solely ‘Other’, making the film’s mode of address additionally problematic. Richard Dyer highlights this in his seminal text, White: Any instance of white representation is always immediately something more specific – Brief Encounter is not about white people, it is about English middle-class people; The Godfather is not about white people, it is about Italian-American people. But The Color Purple is about black people, before it is about poor, southern US people.18

Stavros invites Marenglen to the funeral, where it is revealed that any relation to Mother was founded on an old picture of him as a child with his mother, and on a similar picture that Stavros possesses. Marenglen’s faith in the signifying power of the photographic image echoes Roland Barthes’ meditations on the ontology of the photograph as a signifier of loss.19 Marenglen’s photograph depicts a moment that happened and simultaneously is the representation of a lost mother. His only link to the past is an empty signifier that apparently derives from wishful thinking. Marenglen is thus an ‘absolute other’,20 particularly since he does not have a name or patronym. ‘Marenglen’ refers to a popular Albanian anecdote, ‘a portmanteau name made up of three sainted names: Marx, Engels and Lenin’.21 Remzi on the other hand is a fictitious name. Unconditional hospitality is consequently a utopia, especially since Mother suffers a second stroke and is unable to speak or understand Albanian, eliminating language as a premise of hospitality. During the men’s

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first encounter, Marenglen underlined Mother’s language shift: ‘I may have only a photograph, but she speaks Albanian.’ When Stavros asks her ‘are you nuts?’ the speculation whether Mother was initially acting solely on her dementia is unwarranted. At the film’s conclusion Marenglen is out of sight and arguably out of mind. Stavros embraces otherness and declares ‘I am Albanian’ to his estranged ex-wife while in the final shot the cross-cultural monument is complete. Stavros and his friends sit in their familiar corner, frappe in hand, as though the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nevertheless, while Stavros can so easily become Albanian, with all the term’s essentialising connotations on otherness, Marenglen cannot become Greek, in other words obtain citizenship – the more concrete understanding of hospitality in the public and political spheres.22 Marenglen is, then, a familiar foreigner but at the same time is not a Greek citizen, kept at a safe distance from the Athenian ‘natives’. The sinister implications of the racist chant from Correction are loud and clear: Marenglen will never become Greek. Plato’s Academy narrativises multiculturalism and European reform as a painful coming-of-age tale. Indeed, it reinforces conditional hospitality as par excellence European by casting the ‘Other’ to a peripheral role without contesting what this choice necessitates: that Europe’s ‘Others’ are predetermined to occupy the margins of European host societies.

Otherness as Moral Duty: Eternity and a Day Eternity and a Day tracks the wandering of Alexander, a poet and self-exile diagnosed with terminal cancer. The film opens with a childhood memory as a dream: children run out of a white mansion and into a tranquil sea, while the voice-over addresses the passing of time and the existence of a ruined ancient city buried underwater. Cut to Alexander as he prepares to spend his last days in the hospital. The opening sequence is bathed in the natural colours of the sea and the bright white of the children’s costumes. In the present, grey undertones and low focus lighting, signifiers of a pervading melancholy, dominate. Vassiliki Kolocotroni describes this as ‘an appropriate sequence, setting the tone for a meditation on time, memory, nostalgia, loss’, particularly since ‘the broken statue represents [. . .] what was once whole’.23 In this respect, various sequences of regression to childhood memories and the letters of Alexander’s deceased wife that she reads in the voice-over enhance the pervading dislocation, especially since in his memories Alexander appears in his current ailing state, suggesting that indeed the past is irrevocably lost. Alexander is a modernday Ulysses who after years of wandering decides, contrary to Homer’s

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epic, to abandon his home and even life itself as he aimlessly drifts and daydreams. The reversal of the ‘nostos’, of Ulysses’ forlorn separation from the hearth and long-awaited homecoming, is substituted by perpetual homelessness.24 As Alexander fades into anonymity, his existential plight and personal obsolescence become an overall indication of the death of identity as a symptom of the postmodern condition. The film thus sets the tone for an elusive meditation on loss conveyed through metaphors on all things ‘broken’, embodied by the refugee boy who becomes the focus of Alexander’s attention. Eternity and a Day is the third instalment of an unofficial trilogy on borders and border-crossing, with The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses’ Gaze. These films serve at once as a critique on the multiplicity of borders in Europe but also as meditations on homelessness, exile and cosmopolitanism. Eternity and a Day demonstrates how ‘refugees occupy the place of the heterogeneous, of those persons who are neither simply excluded nor simply included, but who cannot find their place in a Europe divided into national communities by political borders’.25 Eleven minutes into the film, Alexander encounters the boy from Northern Epirus on a busy Thessaloniki street. He is part of a squad of street child-workers. Just as he is cleaning Alexander’s windshield the boy pauses and hides by the car’s side when a police van arrives. As the policemen race to catch the children, Alexander urges the boy to get in. Before leaving, he smiles to Alexander without answering his questions – ‘What is your name, where do you come from?’ Exploring the relationship between the film’s main characters, Nataṧa Kovačević suggests that the director ‘opens up the possibility of a utopian understanding of Europe’s inter-ethnic and interreligious relationships as he breaks the hierarchy between the recognized citizen and the unrecognised homo sacer’.26 However, one needs to take a closer look at the relationship. The child’s silence in the first dialogue gives a clue to the dynamic of the main characters’ communication (and lack thereof) and future relationship in which Alexander assumes the duty − which has unexpectedly been bestowed upon him through the encounter − as a surrogate father. Evidence of this paternalistic disposition is Alexander’s assumption that he must by all means return the boy to his family in Albania, without questioning the reasons that determined his flight in the first place. The phrase he painstakingly tells the boy − ‘I just can’t leave you like this’ − emphasises the urgency of his intervention. Alexander comes to fully realise his role when he spots the boy getting snatched by traffickers. He follows them to an abandoned building at the border where the boy and many other trafficked children are to be sold. While the children are lined up for their prospective buyers, one of them

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Figure 6.4 Alexander is forced to buy the boy from the traffickers in Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos 1998).

breaks a window. The boy from Northern Epirus tries to escape but is apprehended by Alexander who carefully escorts him outside, eventually encountering the traffickers who stand silent and terrifying in their solid stature. Alexander is left with no alternative but to buy his way out. The boy thus fulfils his function as a commodity, providing a first indication of his dwindling agency. Alexander attempts twice to take the boy back to Albania in defiance of the boy’s efforts to stay. He first drives to a bus station from the border region of Pentalofo where the boy will be taken to the Albanian border. Alexander talks to the bus driver only to discover that the boy has run away. The scene cuts to the boy treading the seemingly endless road back. As a symbolic anonymous figure, he embodies the tenacity and willpower of migrants to repeatedly cross borders and challenge the authorities. His steady and vigorous pace and silence underline migration as movement for movement’s sake while his deadpan expression suggests a performance of mobility. The boy then owns a degree of agency, which is why Alexander’s intervention comes across as an interruption. The boy defies all the perils of his precarious life but, for reasons that remain unclear, he succumbs to his self-appointed guardian. ‘You have to understand, I could not leave you like that. I had to find a solution,’ Alexander tells the boy as he escorts him back to the bus. When the stubborn boy gets off the bus just a few seconds later, Alexander exclaims ‘I know what you want, but I can’t do it’.

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Figure 6.5 Alexander displays his paternalistic stance in Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos 1998).

At this point, Alexander drives the boy himself to the Albanian border, performing an act of deportation, albeit with the intentions of a benevolent saviour. Kovačević suggests that the film’s ‘social egalitarianism’ rests on shared language and on otherness: ‘Alexander is interestingly “de-centered” as a good Greek citizen: he feels like an exile, like a foreigner in his own country. The [. . .] boy’s utterances continually change Alexander’s course of action, keeping him open to the possibility of establishing a selfless relationship’.27 Beyond the problem of placing the feeling of exile along the same lines as the challenges of being a refugee, Kovačević in fact reveals how it is Alexander’s course and speech that the film tracks. While Alexander’s alienation and his direct action are so central, the boy’s displacement is peripheral and his overall aims and individuality remain a secret. The silence, anonymity and sparse information surrounding not just his character but his tenacity and submission reinforce the silence and invisibility that determine childworkers as traumatised and incapable of influencing their own destiny. This anonymous boy is indeed treated to the kind of patronage that a victim of fate is treated to, and not an active agent of his own fate. In the process, the structural inequalities that foster trafficking and the push and pull factors of clandestine movement are left unacknowledged. The boy’s ambivalence, running away from the bus, boarding and jumping off, reflects Alexander’s own equivocation, since one moment his

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overwhelming concern for the boy commands that he himself drive the boy to the Albanian border while, towards the film’s end, he mentions with a sense of futility that he ‘must leave’. Alexander’s ambivalence is suggestive of Shakespearean pathos, torn between moral obligation and subjectivity. Alexander’s pathos highlights the burden of his moral obligation, which in any case showcases his benevolence as self-ordained saviour. For Makrygiannakis, Alexander’s role indicates the responsibility of Europeans towards the ‘Other’ and is part of the director’s humanist discourse: the film portends the declaration of a new universal ideal and language which are urgent in times of capitalist commodification and intellectual impoverishment that have fostered the growth of trafficking and universal indifference.28 The necessity of this ‘new language’ is articulated by a student during the iconic bus sequence towards the end of the film: ‘we need new artistic forms and means of expression and if we don’t find them [. . .] we will have nothing’. The sleeping leftist protestor in the bus may very well indicate the indifference of the left toward the world’s impoverishment and, implicitly, the ‘Other’ who needs to be included in a new revolutionary language of belonging and love, the kind that Alexander emblematises through his protective behaviour. Angelopoulos has articulated this very mission to Andrew Horton: ‘in dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, the refugees who are homeless and not wanted, I am trying to seek a new humanism, a new way’.29 Yet, what continues in Eternity and a Day to problematise the possibility of ‘new artistic forms of expression’ is that ‘the leftist agenda of liberating others [and also “Others”] is always already paternalistic in nature’.30 It can be argued then that Alexander’s moral dilemma is not necessarily linked to the boy’s well-being but more to fulfilling a last ‘good deed’. Alexander therefore drives the boy to the Albanian border moving from one space of transit, a bus station, to a space of otherness – the actual border. The boy tells him that he does not have family in Albania, forcing Alexander to quickly change his mind. The boy’s obscure familial status is even more telling of his non-belonging, his condition as a blank slate with no past or present. He is thus conceived as a symbolic, universal exile and a mirror of Alexander’s existential malaise. Back in Thessaloniki, Alexander resigns from his role as saviour and instead adopts that of a mentor as he attempts to educate the boy on the life and work of Greece’s national poet Dionysios Solomos, who also lived in exile. Alexander tells the boy about Solomos’s unfinished poem The Free Besieged which he has been struggling to complete, unable to find the missing words. Alexander discovers the poem’s missing words when the boy sings a traditional folk song about exile. Dimitris Papanikolaou

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maintains that the song’s words, ‘Korfoula mou’ (‘my little flower’), ‘Xenitemeno mou pouli’ (‘my little migratory bird’) and ‘Xenitis’ (‘an exile/a migrant everywhere’), establish a line of continuity with an obsolete and authentic expression of Greekness, linking the boy to Greece’s archaic and obsolete past, its displaced people and their idiomatic version of the Greek language.31 The bond between Alexander and the boy is solidified on the premise that they are both exiles everywhere, like migratory birds and especially Greeks who are in one way or another separated from the ‘motherland’ and mother tongue. Alexander tells his dying mother: ‘Why did I live my life in exile? Why did I feel that I am coming back home only when I spoke my own language? My language.’ The boy rejuvenates Alexander through his connection with the Greek diaspora, its dying32 language and, albeit momentarily, recreates the Greek language with his idiomatic folk song. This exchange, however, strengthens further the hierarchy of the relationship since the boy is not actively offering to teach Alexander but the latter learns from the boy through the kind of pedagogical hierarchy that he himself has established. Stereotypically, children understand what adults cannot since adults are no longer in touch with the kind of innocence and humanity that children are thought to possess because of their uninhibited emotions. The boy thus serves a therapeutic side role, reviving and benefiting the old bourgeois man in rediscovering his own language. Towards the cathartic finale we follow the pair to the port from where the boy will depart to ‘all those ports, Marseilles or Naples, of this vast world’. Alexander’s naive words imply that the boy will carry the Greek spirit towards its cosmopolitan reaffirmation as a ‘xenitis’. Paradoxically, the boy willingly ends his journey in the hands of traffickers who smuggle him alongside other children in a lorry. The last vehicle to enter the boat is the lorry carrying the human cargo. Angelopoulos forces his audience to imagine the children consumed in ‘the belly of the whale’ as he denies us even a glimpse into the vehicle. The scene simultaneously constructs and denies us a staggering image: The children are locked up in a dark lorry that is additionally locked in the ‘bowels’ of a ship. Obscurity and dread conjure up the idea that the children are consumed within this maze of confinement and ultimately in the viscera of globalisation and its apparatus. The sounds of metal clanging, of rusty hinges and winches turning underline the uncanniness of man’s non-presence and drive deeper the scene’s claustrophobia, which prevails over wanderlust. The boy may never reach all the ports of the world since mobility is never his to define. More central though to the narrative, Alexander is ready for his own ‘journey’, having acquired the pathos of the universal refugee.

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Otherness as Panacea: Man at Sea Man at Sea marks an attempt by Constantine Giannaris to deal with migration and otherness beyond the confines of the Greek nation, advocating a moral message that implicates the indifference of the European community toward refugees. In keeping with the theme of this chapter, Giannaris adopts the viewpoint of a Greek protagonist, Alex, the captain of a tanker ship, the Sea Voyager. At open sea, near Basra, Alex takes on board twenty-five teenage refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, found stranded in a lifeboat. The moment they arrive, the ship’s unexpected guests cause a ‘crisis’ pregnant with imminent disaster, heralded by the words of shore-based Mati, who represents the corporation that has chartered the tanker: ‘We are not a charity. Are you pretending to be a Good Samaritan? We are a shipping company. They’re not the first, Captain . . . they just keep coming. OK Alex, you decide now.’ From that moment onwards, we delve into a suspenseful narrative that climaxes into a generic action-packed thriller as crew and refugees violently clash. As the setting becomes increasingly ominous and hospitality a source of dread and even death, Alex is inescapably confronted with the moral dilemma surrounding his duty as captain amidst a soaring refugee crisis. According to Giannaris, ‘I wanted to make a film that comes from the viewpoint of a working-class European’, explaining that he was interested in understanding how ‘one reacts when confronted with a situation of life and death’. It is this very question of the individual’s response that Giannaris poses. He achieves this by promoting a narrative of crisis which entails a life-changing intervention by the – at first – reluctant protagonist: ‘In the beginning they’re right to salvage them, but what happens when you can’t get them off the ship, how do you feel when they’re next to you? And when there are thirty of them? That’s what brings out our innermost aspects of xenophobia, and that’s what I wanted to tap into’, Giannaris concludes.33 Man at Sea directly asks how to handle this ‘crisis’. As we have seen, one solution requires the protagonist to see his own displacement in the refugee and become an ‘Other’, to ‘have no one in the world, to lose everything and everyone he has and loves’, as Samir tells Alex. Man at Sea is filmed exclusively in claustrophobic cabins, engine rooms and on deck: the Sea Voyager becomes an allegorical stage for Europe’s refugee crisis and Alex an allegorical captain unable to do ‘the right thing’. Filmed primarily in English, with some Greek and Farsi, Man at Sea is a rare attempt by a Greek filmmaker to appeal to global audiences in the lingua franca without any of the cultural particularities that are often lost on international audiences. Indeed, there is very little that makes

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Giannaris’s film Greek at face value. By staging his story of refugee crisis at sea, the film has the potential to appeal to international audiences familiar with mediatised narratives of refugees as agents of humanitarian crises. Thanks to these factors, the film adheres to a transnational cinema that can travel and assimilate in the same way the ship crosses international maritime borders, being everywhere and simultaneously nowhere. Moreover, as a non-place, ‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity’,34 the ship does not incorporate any organic society. The events that unfold are purely temporal in their designation: the crisis that escalates happens in the film’s immediate present with no reference to history, identity or society, since the ship is a space of late capitalism that functions according to its designated function – to carry a cargo of crude oil to Shanghai. The film’s temporality accentuates the moral message around Alex’s duty, which the audience is challenged to share. Alex’s obligation can be understood in terms of Derrida’s ‘unconditional hospitality’, which the author insists must never be offered out of duty or in the form of duty, adhering in other words to a law of traditional hospitality which obeys a preordained hierarchy. It is this persistent reliance on hierarchy that transforms host and guest into hostages threatened by each other’s inescapable presence. Indeed, the moment the refugees climb on board, the immediate question for Alex is how and where to rid his ship of this unwanted cargo. Several sequences highlight his role as captain and his power over the refugees. In these official interactions, Alex stands on deck and addresses the refugees, who stand below. The camera adopts at these moments either Alex’s point of view looking down at them, or the refugees’ looking up at him from a low angle, making him appear taller and simultaneously highlighting the refugees’ dependence on their saviour. Yet the film offers a cathartic conclusion as Alex is shown in a lifeboat together with the refugees instead of standing on deck above the anonymous crowd, shouting orders and announcements as captain and host. Despite any transnational aspirations, the film’s nationality is undoubtedly Greek. Its funding sources are Greek and the ship was in fact stationed at the port of Piraeus the whole time. While it appears to be crossing the sea from Basra to Shanghai via Spain and Cape Town, the various establishing shots at open sea were actually designed through computer generated imagery. Considering the GFC’s regulations on a film’s nationality, Man at Sea fully qualifies as Greek. The non-placeness of the setting indicates the power of cinema to conjure the global imagined community without crossing borders. While Man at Sea aspires to cross boundaries and to invite its audience to partake in such an activity, in effect it does

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Figure 6.6 Alex addresses the refugees from a position that displays his hierarchical placement in Man at Sea (Giannaris 2011).

not cross any while evoking the global Andersonian community as limited and sovereign states that erect impenetrable borders. Caught at the ‘doorstep’ of unwelcoming nation states, the ship’s inhabitants occupy an interstitial world, with the refugees serving as the ultimate border subjects since they occupy several levels of confinement. After the first failed attempt to get them to Spain, Mati reports that ‘The coastguard was lying. Nobody wants these refugee kids’. From the outset then, the film’s ‘Others’ embody the misery of the world as undesirable pariahs. The film’s ‘crisis’ narrative fails to challenge Eurocentric discourse which typically imagines refugees as tragic outsiders. As we have seen though, in order to condemn the state’s indifference, filmmakers necessarily resort to an affective language of ‘crisis’ rarely pausing to reflect on the causes of violence. In Man at Sea the refugees are often caught in sudden massive brawls as a result of their growing frustration (and at times eruptive teenage masculinity) or under the care of Alex’s wife Kate, who serves as the doctor on board. The various forms of violence that dominate the refugees’ stay, be it brawls between themselves or the crew, confinement in the ship’s claustrophobic hold and even murder by a treacherous trafficker pretending to be a Médecins Sans Frontières agent, drive dystopia deeper. Simultaneously, this narrative of escalating crisis designates violent rupture and injury as the exclusive domains of the refugees while entirely obscuring the underrepresented elements of refugee and migrant-related violence which are often reproduced by the mass media as moral panics. For Bauman, these events, in their reproduction by the mass media, rarely comprise news but are rather ‘in the news’ and generate ‘refugee tragedy fatigue’. ‘The fate of shocks’ Bauman argues, ‘is to turn into the dull

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routine of normality – and of moral panics to spend themselves and vanish from view and from consciences wrapped in the veil of oblivion’.35 Giorgio Agamben suggests that by maintaining refugees in a perpetual state of crisis, one which calls for urgent humanitarian aid and which makes a silent body the site of such intervention, refugees become political nonentities, outside the realm of politics and in a state of exception.36 The guests’ unexpected arrival kick-starts a narrative that rests on the logic of cause and effect as each failed attempt to help the refugees brings everyone closer to a terrifying disaster, at which point it becomes clear that Alex’s failure to ‘do the right thing’ is linked to his parallel efforts to assert his power as host and captain. What’s more, Alex is forced to keep his initiative a secret from the shipping company, making hospitality an even riskier affair which eventually becomes a catalyst for the narrative as the company lays him off without paying the crew, escalating an already tense situation. Within the chaos that ensues, the refugees become an unmanageable threat that needs to be literally contained as in the film’s final minutes they are transported to the hold. Yet, each step brings Alex closer to catharsis from his own demons as he descends into otherness. The refugees’ short-lived joy gives way to suspense as just ten minutes into the film hospitality is reversed and host transforms to hostage. This is not to suggest that the refugees are actively violating the host’s power or being even remotely hostile. Their presence though stirs great fear among the crew, who blame the captain for negligence, while the refugees demonstrate their own frustration to the bewildered captain in extreme displays of embodied protest. As Nikolas, a crew member, tells Alex following yet another brawl, ‘You have forsaken your men. You only love your little Muslims. The ship is ours too.’ Derrida exposes the underlying meaning of hostility within hospitality: I want to be master at home [. . .] to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my ‘at home’ [. . .], I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage.37

It is this very paradox of hostility within hospitality that Giannaris taps into in his critique of European indifference. The ship’s strict hierarchy hinders unconditional hospitality, particularly because Alex can function only as long as the refugees appear to be in his need and debt. Once they start to encroach on his power, hospitality becomes a hostage situation. The dynamic between Samir, Alex and Kate is emblematic of the persistence of victimhood as a major premise of

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otherness that fosters conditional hospitality. As the youngest of the refugee group, Samir mirrors to the distraught couple their dead son and seems to offer them the opportunity to redeem themselves of their guilt as failed parents. Having lost both parents in war-stricken Afghanistan, Samir appears to Kate as a teenager in need of a surrogate mother: while tending to Samir’s lung infection, Kate tells Alex ‘He is in shock. He has lost his mother.’ When he wakes up, Samir exclaims ‘Where is my mother?’ with Alex in the background looking deeply concerned. These moments serve to paint Samir as a traumatised boy in need of parental affection. After a violent brawl, Kate runs frantically in search of Samir. The alternating cuts to the open sea illustrate Kate’s fear that Samir might have drowned, like her son. When she spots him, she tenderly hugs him and promises to never leave him in harm’s way. Then she explains how the crucifix she wears around her neck, which Samir looks at with curiosity, belonged to her son. This is the first time the possibility of a surrogate family becomes tangible as Kate allows Samir to sleep in her room. What’s more, Kate exclaims with despair to Alex, in a scene that emblematises her character’s links to a nurturing motherhood, that she wants another son. What comes, however, to disturb the prospect of a surrogate family is Samir’s eruptive masculinity, as he mistakes Kate’s affection for attraction. Samir kisses her and immediately Kate distances herself, looking visibly disturbed by this obvious violation; the body in need has aspired to be a body for sexual pleasure. Afterwards, she discovers that her son’s crucifix is missing and accuses Samir of stealing it, as though he has consciously tried to replace the lost son. As Elsaesser sarcastically notes, ‘we enjoy the “other” only when he consents to either mirroring us or to playing the victim. Woe to him who shows us his desire when it’s no longer constructed in our image!’38 Consequently, Alex launches a witch hunt in search of the culprit and becomes increasingly hostile toward Samir, telling him ‘you are the cause of this’ when another violent brawl breaks out. At the same time, Kate leaves the ship after receiving a beating by Alex. His behaviour is a result of guilt over the failed efforts to get the refugees to Médecins Sans Frontières, which led to the execution of several refugees by a ruthless Nigerian trafficker. Samir’s surrogate status as Alex’s son amplifies the latter’s guilt in need of recuperation since it is disclosed that Alex’s efforts to keep his son on board against his will led to the latter’s accidental drowning. Unable to deal with his guilt, Alex becomes a captor rather than a host until the cathartic finale: struggling to protect the refugees from the mutinying crew, Alex forces them into the hold. In protest, they cut their foreheads with a blade. Alex urges them to stop and launches himself into the group, bringing him into physical proximity to the refugees, always

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Figure 6.7 The refugees cut themselves, performing embodied protest in Man at Sea (Giannaris 2011).

following the pattern of violence and injury. As a result, he gets accidentally cut. Having become a hostage on his own ship, Alex disembarks at night in a lifeboat with the refugees. In the final shot, Samir rests his head on Alex’s lap and gazes at him with affection as the end titles fall. Yet, while differences are seemingly eradicated, the society imagined on the lifeboat is still hierarchical since the refugees are the ultimate ‘Others’ against whom Alex needs to be measured as a pariah. Nevertheless, otherness has rendered the distraught captain a better man.

The Recurring Trope of Victimhood As I have demonstrated, in all four examples the migrant ‘Other’ is peripheral to the protagonist’s course of transformation and overall narrative. At the same time, while the Greek protagonist is granted a fictional character, the migrant ‘Other’ and his experience are essentialised through frameworks of visibility that determine otherness ‘as an affect to be feared and to be pitied in Europe’.39 Instead, in other words, of reproducing migration as a threat, filmmakers resort to the migrant as victim of intolerance. Alain Badiou has convincingly pointed out that, according to an established epistemological hierarchy, ‘the freedom of fiction’ is a given truth for the European citizen, while the documentary and ‘the reality of news’ is assigned for the underprivileged migrant ‘Other’. Victimisation is typical of the contemporary ethical orientation which ‘subordinates the identification of [universal human subject] to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him’.40 Being a victim, the migrant or refugee is reduced to the reality of his ‘bare life’, outside the privileged realms that

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the protagonist occupies. The migrant is thus very often conceived on the level of nature, as a silent body. We have seen this in Correction, Eternity and a Day and Man at Sea where various forms of violence are inflicted on the body and soul of the ‘Other’: brutal attacks by nationalists, trafficking and police raids, embodied protest, enclosure and cold-blooded murder. In the awkward comedy of Plato’s Academy, the migrant appears as a victim of ludicrous racists who taunt Marenglen. Incidentally, one of Stavros’s friends refers to Marenglen as ‘a poor guy’, denoting his wretchedness. Marenglen, like the Albanian avatar of Correction, will accept any form of employment even when the potential employer is a bullying xenophobe and particularly his alleged host. ‘You are in a mood to joke but I have work to do’ Marenglen answers back to the taunting group of misfits in the first encounter. Nevertheless, he immediately provides his contact number to one of them who claims to need help at home. As Marenglen walks past them, the former phones him up and repeats the popular mantra: ‘You will never become a Greek you bloody Albanian.’ Expectations are affirmed even more in Correction, particularly in the ‘home invasion’ sequence which is characteristic of the film’s reversal of belonging: the bad Greek is at first threatening but in actuality he is merely a tame version of the migrant threat. The social and political urgency of Eternity and a Day and Man at Sea is linked to humanitarian-based individual action as the prevalent conception of political activism in the Global north of the 1990s. Craig Calhoun observes that earlier forms of labour and civil rights-based solidarity action have turned towards a more solitary form of humanitarian activism which retained ‘the emotional urgency of 1960s politics, but in a form not dependent on any political party, movement, or state’.41 As humanitarianism and charity have become the dominant forms of leftist political action, clandestine migrants and refugees have become the primary figures to bring Europe an opportunity for individualised political activism, for these communities ‘are the prototypical face of the emergency’.42 Charity, though, as opposed to solidarity, does not address the structural roots of a problem. The temporary character of charity in humanitarian aid is underlined in these films as they end with the clandestine migrants moving on to a new destination, relieving the protagonist from seeking more permanent solutions. Indeed, all films follow a circular pattern as stranded refugees are again lost at sea, marginal Albanian migrants occupy the city’s margins and childworkers return in the clutches of traffickers despite the protagonists’ good intentions. In any case though, they occupy little space in audiences’ conscience.

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By mirroring the protagonist’s alienation and by transforming otherness into a panacea, these films fetishise the stranger through ‘the presumed universality of homelessness’ that Sara Ahmed cautions us about. Thanks to such fetishising, ‘the journey towards the stranger becomes a form of self-discovery in which the stranger functions yet again to establish and define the “I”’.43

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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Derrida (1972). Karalis (2012), p. 241. Loshitzky (2010), p. 9. Kristeva (1988). Bauman (1996), pp. 18–36. Memmi (2000), p. 138. Golfinopoulos (2007). Leontaris (2010), p. 64. Calotychos (2013), p. 191. Psimmenos (2001), p. 71. Calotychos (2013), p. 191. Leontaris (2010), p. 64. Hall (1996a), p. 166. Hall (1997), p. 236. Significantly, the modern neighbourhood of Colonus is named after Hippeios Colonus, the suburb near Plato’s Academy in classical Greece; moreover, Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus deals precisely with issues of inclusion, exclusion and belonging and has featured in Derrida’s seminal speeches ‘Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/from the Foreigner’ (Derrida 2000a) and ‘Step of Hospitality, No Hospitality’ (Derrida 2000b). I am thankful to Tonia Kazakopoulou for bringing this to my attention. Kapllani (2010), p. 38. Calotychos (2013), p. 195. Dyer (1999), p. 459. Barthes (2000). Derrida (2000a), p. 25. Kapllani (2010), p. 91. Interestingly, in the 2014 municipal elections, Golden Dawn came first in several residential neighbourhoods including that of Colonus, ‘our turf ’. See ‘Proto Komma i Chrysi Avgi se Kolono ke Sepolia’ [‘Golden Dawn Comes First at Municipal Elections in Colonus and Sepolia’] found online at http:// news.in.gr/greece/article/?aid=1231320138. Accessed 4 September 2019. Kolocotroni (2000), p. 400. Makrygiannakis (2008), p. 273.

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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Thomassen (2006), p. 382. Kovačević (2008), p. 195. Ibid. Makrygiannakis (2008), p 274. Horton (1997), p. 30. Brown (2010), p. 46. Papanikolaou (2009), p. 11. The death of language and the nation feature consistently in the later phase of Angelopoulos’s oeuvre. One may recall here the iconic taxi sequence in Ulysses’ Gaze during which the taxi driver, played by the revered actor Thanasis Vengos, embarks on a soliloquy with the line ‘Greece is dying’ (I Ellada petheni). Proimakis (2011). Augé (1995), p. 79. Bauman (2016), p. 2. Agamben (1998). Derrida (2000a), pp. 53–4. Elsaesser (2005), p. 345. Celik (2015), p. 21. Badiou (2001), p. 10. Calhoun (2010), p. 49. Ibid. Ahmed (2000), p. 6.

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C H AP TER 7

Our Own People? Repatriation, Citizenship, Belonging

Up to now, we have seen how Hostage and Roadblocks project liminality as a way of life. Eduart and See You conjure Albanian identities beyond the constraints of Greco-Albanian nationalism and stereotypical discourse and with Plato’s Academy, Man at Sea, Correction and Eternity and a Day, hegemonic identity is reasserted in relation to the constitutive ‘Other’. In the latter, Greek protagonists appear as strangers in their own country. In this section, I discuss films that deal head-on with the erroneous possessive pronoun and in particular with the repatriation of Greek-speaking Orthodox populations from Albania and the Pontic region, the so-called omoethneis (co-Ethnics) in From the Snow (Goritsas 1993) and From the Edge of the City (Giannaris 1998). These films reimagine the return and uneven integration of the Greek diaspora in their alleged homeland in the early 1990s. Xenia (Koutras 2014) on the other hand negotiates questions of citizenship through its Albanian protagonists, who set forth to find their alleged Greek father, their key to receiving Greek citizenship since, after turning eighteen, Ody, the eldest of the two brothers, is no longer granted a temporary residence permit. Despite a wide array of formal and thematic variations, the proposed case studies all ask what constitutes ‘our own’ people. Sotiris Goritsas and Constantine Giannaris put to the test the Greek agenda of repatriation which aimed to strengthen national homogeneity on the axis of religion, ethnicity and history and further demonstrate how the Greeks of southern Albania, or Northern Epirus as it is referred to in Greece, and Pontian Greeks were in fact regarded as strangers who imported more degrees of foreignness than familiarity. With Xenia, Panos Koutras looks into the temporality of second-generation Albanians in Greece and proposes hybrid frameworks of belonging that transcend the mandates of citizenship and legal residence. Readers are thus invited to reflect on the pitfalls of the prevalent ‘models of citizenship adopted by each European nation state – ius sanguinis (law of blood), ius soli (law of the soil) and ius domicile (law of residence)’.1

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In From the Snow, Goritsas sets into motion a journey of hope turned descent into homelessness that falls clearly within the categories of migrant journeys discussed by Naficy and Loshitzky. Otherness and displacement, however, take on a different meaning from the journeys of foreign migrants as audiences identify with co-Ethnics who carry a different set of expectations (migrant imagination) and cultural baggage. Goritsas’s is the first Greek film to evoke the entire trajectory, from clandestine bordercrossing to the hardships experienced en route to and in Greece that put into relief the emerging placement of Greece in the echelons of Fortress Europe. Here, the alleged homeland increasingly resembles the locus of exilic life. In similar fashion to Roadblocks and Hostage, liminality, claustrophobia and epistolarity govern the journey, which ends with sudden death and a sombre departure. The film’s Northern Epirotes make the arduous journey amidst the fall of the Hoxha regime which had historically oppressed the Greek Orthodox minority.2 Homecoming, however, is met with bewilderment since they are marginalised and brutalised during sweep operations. This appears to happen because they are regarded by local folk and authorities as Albanians rather than co-Ethnics. Their departure from Greece is thus imminent. By reimagining the separation of Northern Epirotes from their originary homeland, From the Snow showcases the nationalistic conditioning of the Greek people and simultaneously rearticulates the terms of belonging in direct function to the constitutive ‘Other’: Northern Epirotes are ‘our own people’, separated from their compatriots, contrary to Albanians who were strangers. The agenda of repatriation was thus a determining factor in the reception of ‘Other’ migrants. The Pontian adolescents of From the Edge of the City are commonly referred to as ‘Russo-Pontians’, a term that forefronts their ties to Russia rather than a solid belonging to the Greek ethnos. Their parents brought them over from Kazakhstan in 1990 as part of the Greek state’s plan to repatriate the Pontian Greek diaspora. Their ancestry can be traced back to the ancient Ionian colonies of Asia Minor – the Pontic coast. Ottoman invasions in the eighteenth century, and Kemalist persecution in the early twentieth, forced Greek populations to seek refuge in imperial Russia, where they were welcomed. During Communist rule, Stalin was ‘extremely hostile to the Greeks’ and transferred many Ethnic minorities from Crimea to the steppes of Central Asia and Siberia.3 Things improved during Gorbachev’s presidency when Greek governmental organisations urged the Greeks of the former Soviet Union to migrate to their ‘motherland’, where they were promised housing, education, land and financial aid, none of which materialised due to poor infrastructure. At the time,

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mass demonstrations were organised in major Greek cities to express the Greekness of Macedonia (a perpetual source of nationalist sentiments), while public discourse overall encouraged the liberation of Greeks living under totalitarian regimes and reuniting as a way of strengthening national consciousness at a period when identity and demography were being tested.4 In both cases, co-Ethnics were conjured in the media and public discourse as privileged citizens who would return as though on separate routes from ‘Other’ migrants. This distinction was reinforced by more relaxed routes to naturalisation granted to Pontian Greeks, as long as they could ‘prove’ their Ethnic Greek descent through bureaucratic criteria, specifically a repatriation visa acquired in Moscow which made it easier to demonstrate Greekness – and incidentally easy for non-Greeks, too.5 On the value of narratives involving co-Ethnics, Papanikolaou aptly notes that ‘stories of repatriation and “return” may be appealing in today’s national [. . .] contexts. They are easily readable, as they confirm (rather than challenge) stereotypes (the Greek hero), symbolic narratives (the return of Odysseus) and more stable accounts of collective identity (the originary homeland)’.6 Diamanti-Karanou also reminds us that the early 1990s were ‘a period of strong emotions for Greeks living abroad’, showcasing the widespread effect of nation-building discourse among diasporic communities.7 The newcomers’ longing to return to their ancestral home was also informed by their disillusionment with the Soviet system and an infatuation with the capitalist order which, in their imagination, Greece represented.8 From the Edge of the City rejects the sociopolitical agenda of repatriation and simultaneously any obvious category of film classification, adhering to the spirit of New Queer Cinema, which saw shifting trends in films that queer heteronormative values beside cinematic conventions.9 With his seminal first feature film, Giannaris passionately confronts the patriarchal roots of the (Greek) nation and destabilises narratives that have been central to the production of national identity, simultaneously evoking the hardships of Pontian Greeks who were pushed to the margins of Athens, here the rural vicinity of Menidi. Queer cinema does not cater to a particular category and is not a neatly defined genre per se. Rather, it commands a particular spirit open to interpretation by filmmakers and scholars. As an umbrella term, queer has been used to indicate the temporality of those who fail to fit in. Leanne Dawson clarifies that ‘[W]here queer theory originally considered gender and sexuality, a noteworthy trend in the past decade is that of queer temporality, with a focus on non-normative life schedules either alongside or rather than queer gender or sexuality’.10 In film studies, queer can mean

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the deconstruction of all notions of purity in terms of form and representation. In Berghahn’s words, queer films ‘[articulate] a critique of fantasies of purity, which simultaneously underpin certain traditional models of family (based on bloodline and descent, gender hierarchies and heteronormativity) and nationalist ideologies (based on Ethnic absolutism and other essentializing concepts)’.11 The use of queer is doubly meaningful in this case as it underscores non-heteronormative gender and sexuality and double occupancy, which further hampers a smooth integration, making it more enticing to explore in-betweenness. According to Berghahn, Queer diasporic subjects are doubly different or doubly marginalized and therefore lend themselves particularly well to identity discourses of diasporic cinema with its emphasis on marginality. [. . .] [T]he conjoining of these particular identity categories is not coincidental: queerness and diaspora are both defined by a minority status and awareness. One of the shared concerns of queer and Ethnic minorities is the extent to which they enjoy full and equal citizenship.12

Sean Griffin and Harry Benshoff, reading across the lines of gender and sexuality, tell how ‘minimalism and excess, appropriation and pastiche, mixing of styles and forms can confuse totalities’.13 Queer cinema has thus meant an exciting new order of filmmaking that lends itself to diverse scholarly frameworks of analysis. Made at a time when new queer cinema had yet to gain a firm footing in Greek film production, From the Edge of the City merges the vicissitudes of melodrama with the cheap aesthetics of pornography, enveloped by a soundtrack of Pontian melodies mixed with techno beats, to portray a queer version of diasporic ‘boys in the hood’. Most importantly, it ‘undermines the conventional narrative of successful Greek repatriations by presenting a group of Russian-Greek young men negotiating both their position within Greek society and their framing by a new queer (cinematic) gaze’.14 Panos Koutras has steadily represented queer cinema through his signature interpretation of postmodern pastiche. He broke new ground with A Woman’s Way/Strella (2009), a film that boldly inverts ‘the social performance of gender’15 by embodying camp and the universe of Athenian transvestites. In Xenia, Koutras blends genres and styles ranging from the road movie, to magical realism, to musicals and coming-of-age tales. His boisterous, openly gay Albanian teenager, Dany, refutes mainstream expectations of ethnic and sexual minorities: despite his immaturity and propensity for mischief, Dany’s character eschews victimhood and reinvigorates the archive of migrant and gay characters. Koutras celebrates hybridity and in-betweenness, exemplified by Dany’s gleeful acceptance of his sexuality and ethnicity in his trademark phrase ‘a faggot and an

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Albanian, mountain and sea’ which informs my analysis. For Berghahn, ‘in-betweenness can also be understood in positive terms as “having the best of both worlds”.16 This revalorization is expressed in spatial metaphors of border-crossing, third space [. . .] and in the concept of hybridity that has replaced previous dichotomous conceptualisations of diasporic subjectivity’.17 Xenia and From the Edge of the City showcase the power of queer to undermine the cultural makeup of the Greek nation. They speak far more about ‘them’ than ‘us’ but, seen through a queer lens, they are neither one nor the other. They can be read today against the untethered presence of Golden Dawn in mainstream politics and in relation to the growing relevance in public life of Pride parades and the coming-out of an LGBTQ community in Greece – of Greeks and ‘Others’.

Imagined Community, Imagined Fatherland The collapse of Enver Hoxha’s regime saw the opening of borders and mass migration of Albanians, who descended on Greece in tandem with the Greeks of Northern Epirus after the Greek state issued its official invitation for repatriation. The region was one of the irredenta included in the agenda of the so-called Megali Idea (the Great Idea). The irredenta were territories outside Greece inhabited by Ethnic Greeks. Irredentism commands that ethnicity is co-terminous with nationality and defined in terms of religion, language and culture. The Megali Idea was a concept of Greek nationalism that expressed the goal of establishing a Greek state that would encompass Greek populations from regions that were still under Ottoman rule following the War of Independence (1821–8) and all the regions that traditionally belonged to Greeks in antiquity. According to Anna Triandafyllidou, the Megali Idea, ‘namely the cultural, political and military project of claiming the irredenta and integrating them into the Greek state, represented the political expression of the Ethnically, religiously and culturally-linguistically defined Greek nation’.18 The deeper meaning, therefore, of repatriation was to transform an internally divided country into a homogenised nation state. From the Snow tracks the journey of Achilles, Thomas and the orphan boy Nikos. The opening sequence features a tow-truck piled with men heading to the Greek–Albanian border during the insurrection of 1991. On the voiceover, Achilles narrates their sudden decision to return to the ‘patrida’ (fatherland), revealing that this is a homecoming journey to the originary homeland of the (fore)father. They make their way to the Greek fraction of Northern Epirus, crossing at night through barbed-wire fences guarded by Albanian soldiers. Once in Greece, they

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are apprehended by soldiers and transferred to a derelict refugee camp where they are strictly monitored. Following their escape from the dystopic refugee camp, Achilles and Nikos head to Athens. There, the pair encounter the xenophobia of the Greek people and are exploited by opportunistic employers – an emerging Greek urban population that embraced the benefits of flexible, illegal migrant labour. By the end, audiences have followed a trajectory that transforms hope into despair and homecoming into homelessness. Rather than looking into the journey’s chronotopes of exile and crisis, I will interrogate a brief hospitality sequence that serves as the catalyst for the migrants’ departure as they are mistaken for Albanians by a Greek host. This misunderstanding refutes their belonging as Ethnic Greeks and conveys the bewilderment and disillusionment that Northern Epirotes experienced in Greece. Before this sequence, the surrogate family of Thomas, Achilles and Nikos sleep in a derelict passage layered with rubbish. As though to evoke the ubiquitous presence of the police, the group, alongside many more Ethnic Greeks, are attacked by police with water cannons. They get thrown onto the street and come under the gaze of an anonymous man, observing it all with a curious look. The scene cuts suddenly to an establishing shot of the crammed interior of a Greek household in a brightly lit kitchen, where the migrants eat. The household gradually becomes ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’,19 the metaphor of the sovereign household operating effectively. From the outset, the space of hospitality is uncomfortable. Achilles and Thomas are too tall for the low ceiling, while the host nervously observes from the corner. Goritsas films the scene in tight close-ups, focusing on Achilles and Thomas with the host standing too close, establishing thus a sense of uncomfortable proximity. The tight space feels increasingly restricting as the host’s positioning and posture become progressively suggestive of his role as master of the house. Hospitality is from the beginning complicated, since this sudden transition from the street to the household evokes the unexpected arrival of foreigners into the space of the nation. The Athenian household is a claustrophobic interior that enhances an already familiar sense of the inescapability felt en route to Greece and in Athens, as presented earlier in the film. Thomas gestures with his glass and the host fills it. Achilles attempts to pick up a piece of bread from the floor and the host’s hand appears in a close-up, literally grabbing Achilles’s hand and inserting in it a fresh slice, the gesture feeling intrusive. These silent and comically unsettling moments feel as awkward as the relationship between host and guests. The

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Figure 7.1 An uncomfortable coexistence between indigenous and Ethnic Greeks in From the Snow (Goritsas 1993).

host’s gesture and overall stance is paternalistic, particularly since he is constantly keeping his eye on them. His anonymity further reinforces his allegorical function. The impression of confinement and awkward pairing of host and guests permeate the scene as the host begins to reveal his true intentions: ‘It will not hurt you to say thank you,’ he says. This is the first indication of conditional hospitality, articulated by a host who lacks the nerve to exert his power coming across as petty. His eagerness for reciprocation from his guests heightens as he points at each one. ‘So, did I get it right, Achilles, Nikos and Thomas?’ Achilles looks silently at Thomas, spaghetti hanging from his mouth, as though hoping for an answer, while the host, left with no alternative but to sulk, leaves. His need for gratitude and to know whom he lets into his house is suggestive of the binding contract underlying Derrida’s concept of conditional hospitality. Although he opens his house to his unexpected guests, he is too quick to articulate a set of expectations that remind everyone of their place – foreigner versus indigenous Greek, sovereign versus disenfranchised. The tense dynamic evokes the kind of anxieties that the Greek middle class experienced when faced with the Ethnic Greek who brings conflicting values and features that depart from those of the indigenous Greek. The question therefore becomes whether the migrants should be welcomed as foreigners or indeed as Greeks.

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Very soon, Thomas and host get into a fight. The latter pretends to call the police, asking ‘Could you please come to my house, I have a serious problem. Yes, Albanians’. Before their inevitable departure Thomas articulates the plight of Ethnic Greeks: ‘It’s all right. He wanted Albanians to do all the work without paying a dime.’ Thomas’s words echo the confusion and disappointment that Ethnic Greeks experienced in Greece and simultaneously highlight the exploitation and exclusion of Albanians. Ethnic Greeks had a relatively privileged life in Greece while Albanians became the ‘helots of the new millennium’.20 This evidence problematises the film’s claim that Ethnic Greeks were treated as pariahs in the way it shows. Lazaridis argues further that racist media discourse endorsed the exploitation of Albanians, their exclusion from the Greek labour force and the benefits linked to the latter. Despite what the film depicts, Ethnic Greeks did enjoy these privileges to a greater extent than Albanians. As a result, racist stereotypes emerged. ‘For instance, the expression “I am not your Albanian” that is, “I am not your slave,” is often used by Greeks to refuse a job which is seen as menial and underpaid’.21 Additionally, such work was most often uninsured, for clandestine and seasonal enterprises that, at a time of global competitiveness that required a flexibilisation of the labour supply, relied on cheap migrant labour. Albanians would hence become associated with construction sites and the agricultural industry, arguably the most precarious sites of migrant employment in Greece. Repatriation, however, was endorsed through a different discourse, in particular by the widespread notion that Ethnic Greek-Orthodox populations were the victims of discrimination in Albania, exposing a lasting rivalry between Ethnic Greeks and Albanians. At the same time, Albanians and a respective label of Balkan and communist barbarism were conjured as major threats to Greeks and the Greek state under Europeanisation. This strengthened national consciousness, while reinforcing the inferiority of Albanians – essentially reinforcing belonging by highlighting the terms of non-belonging. Albanians in Greece were associated with vendetta and organised crime imported from the Albanian north and accused by corporate media of the majority of crimes and petty theft, proving them ungrateful towards the gracious hosts who offered them work and a roof. The notion of an ungrateful guest was indeed a common theme in the media.22 Thus, the imagined features of Albanians, articulated by their hosts, became a raison d’être for their exclusion and the emergence of Albanophobia. Nevertheless, the conditioning of indigenous Greeks was such that blood, residence and soil deemed Ethnic Greeks as strangers who were not automatically accepted as Greeks and suffered some discrimination

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in their so-called ‘fatherland’, a term that Achilles mentions often throughout the film. This was a devastating turn of events for many, who were expecting to be treated as members of the Greek nation. Moreover, since sweep operations endorsed the notion that all immigrants were Albanian criminals, this meant that Ethnic Greeks were also ‘swept away’ by a large broom that did not distinguish between social pariahs. This phenomenon is portrayed clearly in the film and in the bleakest of settings – the hostile and alienating urban environment that was Athens at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, while Ethnic Greeks were marginalised, Albanians were ‘shut off completely from the kind of social relationships which Ethnic Greek-Albanians have’.23 Arguably, the film’s host, thinking that the migrants are Albanian, considers it a given that Albanians perform unpaid work. Thomas seems to agree with this principle. Judging by his own conviction, Ethnic Greeks should not perform work that is stereotypically assigned to Albanians. Indeed, what seems to be missing from his statement is the phrase ‘we are not your Albanians’. This scene and its underlying assumptions regarding the hierarchy of Greekness allow us to speculate on the expectations and prejudice of Ethnic Greeks who saw themselves as a separate group from Albanians. The role of Albanians in the film is also problematic. Up until this scene, there is no mention of the staggering numbers of Albanians who migrated together with Ethnic Greeks, while the film’s only Albanian is shown during the refugee camp sequence where Thomas accuses him of stealing his wallet. Surely it is problematic to associate the only Albanian in the film with stealing and the Ethnic Greek protagonists with more noble themes of homecoming? Albanians were indeed arriving en masse in 1991 alongside Ethnic Greeks and the Greek authorities were unprepared for the scale and suddenness of immigration,24 the invitation by the Greek government to Ethnic Greeks acting almost as a decoy of false promise. According to Lazaridis and Psimmenos, ‘there was a lack of administrative expertise, and there were no appropriate legislative and social policy measures in place’ making the glorious homecoming of Ethnic Greeks a nationalist fantasy. ‘In Albania they called us Greeks. Here they call us Albanians,’ Thomas continues, highlighting further that Ethnic Greeks were at odds with Albanians. This final statement summarises the disillusionment of Northern Epirotes and reinforces the nationalist predilection that set repatriation into operation. Contrary to promise and expectation, they are taken for Albanians. We can see then how Ethnicity determines belonging and hospitality in the private and public spheres.

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To be mistaken for an Albanian is casus belli, articulated on the basis upon which exclusion and inclusion operate, that is, those of ‘Ethnic descent, language, common historical memories, and/or links with historic homelands and culture’.25 The migrants expect to be identified according to their ethnicity. This is a major pitfall of the film that affirms its essentialist appeal. Goritsas exposes and mocks the Greek host, but does not question ethnicity, since the moral message of hospitality is the very notion of belonging to the Greek ethnos. Before assuming any notion of belonging, we need to consider that its location is imagined. Goritsas articulates the predicament of Ethnic Greeks by highlighting belonging and ethnicity instead of greater inclusion, when both Ethnic Greeks from Albania and Albanians themselves were seeking refuge in Greece. To prioritise one group over the other, or to accept any distinction between Greek returnees and Albanian migrants, means leaving the possessive pronoun undisturbed. Calotychos comments on this in his brief analysis of the film: ‘[. . .] the question remains as to what makes someone our own people? The concept, as the troubling possessive pronoun indicates, relies heavily on a prenationalist localism built on possession and inclusion, dispossession and exclusion’.26 When one considers particularly the foreign elements that Northern Epirotes imported, it is worth imagining the extent to which, conversely, Albanians could see them as their own people. State policy in the early 1990s allegedly allowed authorities to distinguish Ethnic Greeks from Albanians. This could not be carried out as predicted due to the abstract foundations of state policy. In order to be considered a co-Ethnic, one needs ‘to belong to the Greek Ethnos’ according to the 1983 decree of the state council. That is, ‘to have Greek national consciousness which is deduced from characteristics of personality which refer to common descent, language, religion, national traditions and extensive knowledge of the historical events of the nation’.27 These criteria reflect and reinforce the ethnic, cultural and religious definition of the Greek nation, a traditional imagined community contested by strangers from a rival nation who claim to share the same line of historical continuity. Where documentation served as proof of origin, authorities could not always certify its authenticity, while often enough documents were damaged, lost or simply indecipherable. Thomas and Achilles display their Albanian residence papers which have the title ‘Greque’ – a term that breaks with the Greek ‘Hellinas’, arguably hinting to the problem that Ethnic Greeks were not Greek enough. ‘See,’ they tell the confused soldiers who apprehend them in the film’s first quarter, ‘it says Greek.’ Language was a contrived issue since most co-Ethnics spoke poor Greek (unlike the film’s protagonists, who speak it fluently). Simultaneously,

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we can see how hospitality, in its more broad appeal, is negated by state policy and its language since Ethnic Greeks were considered co-Ethnics instead of Greek citizens. This is what Thomas expresses, since in Albania they were distinguished as Greek citizens. Derrida exposes this form of reluctance in the citizenship policy governing Algeria after World War II: ‘[. . .] Algerian Muslims were what was called “French Nationals” but not “French citizens,” a subtle but decisive distinction. Basically they did not have citizenship in the strict sense, without being absolute foreigners’.28 Hospitality functions on the premise of belonging in the public and private domain. At various instances the police and military fail to distinguish Greeks from Albanians and in the refugee camp they are all piled up without distinction. When Achilles seeks accommodation at a shady hotel in central Athens, the receptionist displays ignorance and utter indifference when Achilles mentions the founding of Omonoia, the political party of the Greek minority in Albania. Achilles addresses him as ‘patrioti’ (patriot, here compatriot) and spells out his name for him, emphasising that he ‘has not come to cause trouble’, as though to reiterate the favourable image of a co-Ethnic, in contrast to the threat that Albanians represented, who were thought of, even before their descent on Greece, as inherently criminal and cunning. Yet, the entire trajectory of migration exposes a profound inability on a national scale to properly distinguish a Greek co-Ethnic from an Albanian ‘Other’.

Neither Here nor There: Tracing Queer Temporality in From The Edge of the City Thus far, I have shown how Sotiris Goritsas has tackled the return migration of Northern Epirotes. The migrant trajectory in his film underscores the pitfalls of nationhood by illustrating one of the major obstacles hindering the repatriation of Greeks from Albania: they are, simply put, not Greek enough. Their belonging to the Greek ethnos, however, is unquestioned. They are fluent in Greek, their papers prove their ethnicity and they loathe being called Albanians exactly because they are Greek. They struggle with their whole being, to the point where Thomas commits suicide, to be accepted in their fatherland. When everything fails, the film turns sombre, in keeping with the norms of journeys of hope. With From the Edge of the City, Giannaris challenges the Greek nation’s patriarchal roots and any essentialist notion of belonging that made repatriation possible. His film deals to some extent with the marginality of Pontian Greeks but is more preoccupied with transgressing boundaries and the fixity of filmic illustrations of diaspora and (return) migration without a moralistic

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narrative that pits an unwelcoming European host society against disenfranchised ‘Others’. It is, above all, anti-patriarchal and anti-essentialist. Unlike Goritsas, Giannaris shows no interest in the authenticity of his protagonists and showcases instead their in-betweenness, unsettling instead of reaffirming. For Giannaris, film is a ‘privileged medium through which to think new identifications and the intersection between sexuality (-ies), politics, identity (-ies) and the already existing archive of narratives with which we negotiate all of the above’.29 The unsettling potential of difference and fluid routes of identification, rather than identity-positioning, is at the heart of Giannaris’s vision. His sexuality, and the insights it can provide on the wider nexus of identity, politics and belonging, is essential. He elucidates on this in an interview to Sight and Sound magazine: What I am trying to grapple with now is whether my sexuality has any relevance to the broader world. How does it allow certain insights [. . .]. I want to use these formal devices, that outlook and sensibility to look at a wider society [. . .]. It’s taking on taboos, saying the unsayable – to me that’s what queerness is.30

The director himself defiantly expressed his anti-patriarchal attitude by showing his middle finger to the committee of the Greek State Awards of Quality in 1998, which gave the best film award to Theo Angelopoulos for Eternity and a Day – which had already garnered the Palme D’Or that year. Angelopoulos was in many respects the patriarch of Greek art cinema, revered by critics and filmmakers, the frontrunner of New Greek Cinema and household auteur that brought international acclaim to Greek cinema. Giannaris’s provocative gesture became ‘a powerful sign of a new generation of Greek directors interrogating an established film-making tradition’,31 but was also a call for inclusiveness directed to critics and policy-makers who determine what passes as art and worthy of national accolades. From the Edge of the City tracks a loose narrative based on the quotidian interactions of seventeen-year-old Sasha with his adolescent crowd of Pontians and the Athenian milieu of rich suburban clients who pay for sex. The film opens at Menidi, a place Sasha jokingly calls ‘Mounidi’ (cunt city) in brief interviews with an unseen speaker (Giannaris). This is the first indication of the film’s aspiration to invert established codes. Contrary to expectation, Menidi is not merely a neglected dystopic locus of criminality from where temporalities of crisis erupt.32 The ugliness and lack of promise that Menidi has to offer is implied in a playful manner through Sasha’s word-play with a ‘dirty’ word that exemplifies his adolescent naiveté and charm. Instead of a claustrophobic liminal space,

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Menidi is a departure point, the border from where Sasha and his mates infiltrate the city’s seedy underground. The film’s opening credits show the Pontian gang invading the cityscape. Accompanied by a soundtrack of pulsating house beats, a group of athletic teens glide along the pavements and streets of Athens at night on rollerblades, breaking car windows and stealing radios. This non-diegetic sequence introduces the trio of Sasha, Kotsian and Panayotis in a manner that Giannaris develops to a greater extent throughout the film. The camera eroticises their nonchalant style and agile figures, caressing their bodies and tracking their gliding movement. Rather than a public menace and gang of delinquent migrant youths, the boys are the gods of Giannaris’s filmic universe. They ride on rollerblades like modern heroes who have replaced horses or motorbikes with a queer means of transportation and pass on their loot as if in a relay race. One monumental shot shows them from a low angle against the lights of a building gazing into the distance, the camera fetishising their athletic bodies and curious gaze. These are the new heroes of contemporary queer Greek cinema – hustlers, Pontian Greeks, Russopontians, hyper-masculine teenagers of the club generation.33 Sasha introduces himself to his interlocutor by mixing and inverting: ‘My name is Pont. Rosso Pont. My friends call me Sasha.’ Here, Sasha reappropriates the famous enunciation of the suave masculine hero James Bond (Bond. James Bond) to poke fun at the negative connotations of ‘Rossopontios’, which for Greeks signals

Figure 7.2 A monumental shot of the queer protagonists of From the Edge of the City (Giannaris 1998).

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backwardness (the term Pontian is often used to call someone stupid). At the same time, he adorns his dual nationality with a well-known phrase that connotes an air of cool while presenting himself first as Russopontian. Sasha’s identity and place are never settled though. For the ninety minutes of the film, he adopts and discards identities on the axis of sexuality, gender and ethnicity, appearing at all times to negotiate in-betweenness. Although settled on his sexuality as a straight man and simultaneously a rent-boy who is, however, not a ‘faggot’ as he confidently declares, he constantly sways between his ethnic identities, relying as well on the constitutive ‘Other’ – Albanians. Giannaris renders open the constructedness of identity and its dependence on an ‘Other’. According to Sasha’s friend Yorgos, Sasha was right to quit the construction site where he worked for a brief time. ‘That shit’s only for suckers . . . and Albanians.’ In one of his interviews, Sasha responds with the same defensive reasoning that underscores his Greek ethnicity: Giannaris: Lots of kids around here have left home or have no parents. Sasha: They’re different. Albanians. They left their homes. Their country. They’re lost. We’re not like them. They’re real hicks.

Yet, Sasha holds on to the very constructedness of identity rather than an essential identity per se. Giannaris is indifferent towards an essential truth and identity behind Sasha and Stathis Papadopoulos as a Pontian Greek who at no point inserts his own experience as Russopontian in Greece. The interviews are constructed as well, and in them Sasha only plays one version of himself rather than adding layers of authenticity that would reinforce the film’s sporadic recourse to cinema verité. Cinema verité emerges as a formal choice in scenes that mean little in discourses of repatriation, for example when Sasha and Kotsian break into a quick street dance routine in an amphitheatre where the gang hangs out. Papanikolaou asks if the dance was choreographed and additionally wonders for whom exactly the boys are dancing, alluding to the dynamic of looking and being looked at. Their dance is in fact the result of the two actors’ experience as go-go boys in Athenian clubs where Giannaris saw them and came up with the idea for a film on male club dancers.34 Cinema verité is in other words used to illustrate queer desire, the boys’ masculine features and physique that resemble ancient Greek sculptures and the bodies of boys in the Athenian gymnasium where older men would idly watch. The film itself does not settle on one particular style and set of conventions either, as Giannaris is at ease when blending genres while

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working against mainstream expectations. This is a major departure point for Papanikolaou: To a certain extent, the film develops as a recognizable story about immigrant exclusion, urban marginalization and adolescent alienation. Yet this is by no means a typical account of immigrant alienation. The purposeful mixing of styles, codes and genres [. . .] pushes the story beyond its expected frameworks.35

In her analysis, Panayota Mini also follows on the premise that Sasha’s identity is ‘in flux’.36 From the start, Sasha’s in-betweenness is displayed through an intense confrontation with his father and his place within the family. However, Sasha’s retreat to the underground of the Athenian city centre, where the unsayable can be uttered without the rule of the father, brings forth an entirely different set of aesthetic choices and behaviours. The sequence following the opening credits allows Giannaris to demonstrate his anti-patriarchal stance: the home is a claustrophobic space where Sasha is tightly framed and shown as a subordinate. His domineering father (a figure resembling Raman Bako, Eduart’s authoritarian father in Eduart) may not speak a word in Greek but firmly enforces patriarchal law as it applies to Greek custom. Sasha receives a beating when he announces his decision to quit the construction site, while his father persistently presses him to find work. The mother is complaisant,37 watching from a corner and tending later to Sasha’s wounds from the beating. In the home, hierarchical codes function according to patriarchal tradition.

Figure 7.3 Sasha is confronted by his strict father before being beaten, while the mother watches complaisantly in From the Edge of the City (Giannaris 1998).

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The film switches to a different mood when Sasha visits a brothel where he has sex with Russian prostitutes with whom he shares more than with Greek women. In fact, his only sexual interaction with a Greek woman, Theodora, is as a gigolo, another identity he wears and discards with ease. Theodora, the rich daddy’s girl and cocaine addict, another queer character who upturns patriarchal norms, helps Sasha get exclusive access to prestigious clubs where he too enjoys the pleasures of the Athenian nightlife and counterculture. In the brothel, Sasha seems at home. He greets the prostitute, Olga, in Russian, hinting further to his rootedness in Russia. The scene can be read against the rules of intimacy that ethnicity and familial values command. Later on, a crass taxi driver tells Sasha how there are no more Greek prostitutes left, only foreign, referring to them in derogatory terms. Sasha breaks the rules by having sex with a Russian woman instead of ‘one of his own’. This makes for an atypical brothel visit. ‘[T]heir common language creates a measure of intimacy.’38 The scene, one of few that pay homage to Gus Van Sant’s seminal queer film My Own Private Idaho (1991), is shown through a fast-paced montage of jagged freeze-frames as though turning the pages of pornography magazines, accompanied by a soundtrack of beat music mixed with moaning sounds that simulate an intense sexual encounter in the style of MTV video clips. Unlike pornography though, which prioritises the male gaze, the freeze-frames of sexual intercourse unsettle a male gaze fashioned against female victimhood and objectification, typically associated with trafficked victims like Olga. The scene gains a quicker pace as we cut to the dimly lit red waiting room where Kotsian sits among three other men who exchange passionate glances, hinting at homosexual desire. The entire sequence evokes a passionate sexual encounter from arousal to orgasm, complementing the techno soundtrack. Sasha aspires also to the role of a paterfamilias who looks over his own people and especially women. He plans to marry Elenitsa one day, a sixteen-year-old whom Sasha refers to in his interviews as ‘one of us, a Pontian Greek’. Until that day comes though, she ‘must stay pure’, a virgin. However, Sasha fails to fulfil this role, as Elenitsa is anything but pure. She has also discovered the pleasures of deviancy and dates an older Greek man, not exactly her own people, who provides her with material riches. Arguably, Sasha’s generation of Pontian teens, displaced from their real homeland, are without direction as they are lured into a world of materialistic pleasures that exemplify Greece’s appropriation of neoliberal capitalism in the 1990s. The Greek pimp from Patras, the horrible face of modern patriarchal exploitation, alludes to this when he says that ‘everywhere’s just fine so long as there is money’. Elenitsa rejects Sasha and

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his regressive notion of purity which Sasha, as an object of homosexual desire, also fails to uphold. What’s more, Elenitsa’s father has forbidden her from seeing Sasha since he is jobless and thus, as Elenitsa puts it, useless, echoing his own father’s words. It is therefore up to Sasha to negotiate his place and identity and to overcome the limitation that being ‘useless’ implies and reappropriate the term in a positive light. Sasha’s relationship with women problematises a heteronormative approach to his identity. As a rent-boy, he makes a living by having sex with Theodora and Nikos, the latter a gay man who lives in an affluent suburb. Nikos is infatuated by the charming Sasha to the extent that he accepts being passive during sex. Sasha proudly claims ‘I’m not a faggot’, choosing thus to penetrate rather than be penetrated. His desire to dominate over other men underscores his need to stay at the top of the food chain and maintain his ‘purity’. However, he cannot fit in with the traditional model of the paterfamilias which casts out queer behaviour. He attempts to adopt the identity of a pimp when Yorgos, who also goes by the name of Jura, tries to make him a business partner. Yorgos is looking to sell Natasha, a Russian migrant and exemplary victim of sex trafficking, to Greek pimps for two million drachmas, from which Sasha can benefit as long as he keeps an eye on her while Yorgos is away. A second narrative thread develops from here on. The film transforms to a thrilling Hollywood narrative involving a damsel in distress when Sasha starts to feel affectionate toward Natasha and tries to save her from a tragic fate, while honing the skills of a prototypical male hero of defenceless women. He defends her honour against the crass taxi driver and, at the same time that Yorgos and the pimps are on the prowl, Sasha brings her to his home as though to introduce her to his father who, according to custom, should approve Sasha’s choice and offer his blessings. Things go awry when the father realises she is a prostitute (‘you have brought a whore to my home’). Again, Sasha has failed the father and disturbed the purity of the home by bonding with a Russian and a prostitute, not even a Greek or a Pontian. Sasha is cast out. But before the Hollywood narrative closes, a final duel is necessary. Yorgos arrives at Menidi with the pimps. As though obeying the codes of male duels, the two men remove their shirts, their perfectly sculpted torsos on display. They fight over Natasha, who seems lost and frightened. Instead of a tense battle between good and evil, Giannaris films the Pontian confrontation as a ritualistic version of Greco-Roman wrestling, focusing in close-ups on their bodies rubbing against each other, their flexing muscles and elaborate manoeuvres, unsettling viewer expectations and appropriating the visual codes of Derek Jarman and British queer cinema.

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Yorgos beats Sasha to the ground and moves to capture Natasha before suddenly Sasha stands up and hits back with another intricate manoeuvre, a roundhouse kick, a move attributed in popular culture to another hyper-masculine and prototypical American hero, Chuck Norris. Contrary though to sensational Hollywood depictions that tend to trivialise violence, Sasha actually kills his adversary, leaving Natasha to the pimps who escort her to their car. Natasha is a contemporary hybrid rendition of the tragic femme fatale in Chinatown (Polanski 1974), played by Faye Dunaway, who tragically dies. Natasha, a blonde in the tradition of film noir that lures men with sex and pretends affection for her own gain or safety, is indeed the film’s victim of fate, interwoven with the conventions of film noir and the vicissitudes of migration, trafficking and displacement after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her place in the film underscores the inequalities between return migration, illegal migration and trafficking of women. The film closes with Sasha standing in the middle of a field as the police arrive. Giannaris’s series of male portraits and obsession with the male body comes full circle. The hyper-masculine bodies of Papadopoulos in Hostage and From the Edge of the City and Nikos Tsourakis, who plays Samir, the refugee teen of Man at Sea, perform a series of transgressions that disturb the order of things and are met with the strong arm of the father’s law. Sasha, almost constantly bare-chested, is beaten and bruised by his father when he breaks patriarchal law, which at all times designates his place in society and the family. When he aspires to be a body for love and familial affection, rather than purely a body for manual labour, he is punished. Elion Senja too, from being a body for manual labour becomes a body of love for a Greek woman, both of whom are punished by a prototypical Greek patriarch. Their bodies are the site of transgression and punishment. When Samir shows his affection to Kate, standing proud and bare-chested, he provokes the captain’s wrath, who casts him into the ship’s hold. Giannaris’s hyper-masculine filmic bodies contain a surplus of energy which can destabilise the order of society. This surplus is in line with the excess and visual pleasures of queer cinema. Queer sexuality, desire and sexual energy can dethrone patriarchs and inspire new frameworks of belonging. Yet Sasha’s agency proves self-destructive, as his efforts to settle on one identity provoke tragedy and he remains in police custody with seemingly no future prospect. Arguably, the film does not offer closure or a straightforward happy ending. Sasha will have to continue negotiating his place in a harsh world of easy money and the many contradictions of his identity in a country that pushes Pontian youths to the fringes of the city.

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A Faggot and an Albanian: Queering Belonging in Xenia Moving on from a more direct concept of ‘our own’ people along the lines of ethnicity, religion and the contours of Greek history, this section will explore the temporality of second-generation Albanian immigrants. Northern Epirotes and Pontian Greeks were considered de facto Greek and their migrant trajectories were predicated on the agenda of repatriation. The Albanian teens of Xenia are second-generation immigrants, born and raised in Greece but without Greek citizenship. Instead, they are granted temporary residence thanks to a permit that their underage status allows. Unlike the Northern Epirotes and Pontian Greeks, the protagonists of Xenia were in fact born in Greece and are fluent in Greek. Second-generation immigrants work and attend school and higher education in Greece and, following the passing of new legislation on Greek nationality,39 they can ‘become’ Greeks, contrary to the popular racist slogan ‘One is born Greek, you can’t become Greek’. While legislation opens the way to apply for Greek nationality, this does not necessarily equate itself with the set of civic rights that citizenship implies. Secondgeneration migrants though don’t share a line of historical continuity or, in accordance with the ius sanguinis, Greek blood. Indeed, it is a challenge to think of Ody and Dany as Greeks, with all the essentialisms that accompany such a claim. The film, however, casts off any aspiration to talk about Greekness and nationality, proposing instead a queer nation. Xenia affords a critique of the father as nation and the very values that constitute belonging to the Greek ethnos in a time when the rhetoric of Golden Dawn had a strong footing in the minds of people. Like Giannaris, Koutras confronts the straight all-Greek family and the role of the father in nationalist discourse. Remaining close to the spirit of queer cinema and Koutras’s fondness for camp, Xenia pokes fun at heternormative values and heterosexuality. The film embodies the free-spirited outlook of its gay Albanian protagonist, demonstrating simultaneously the pleasures of hybridity and intersectionality, emblematised in his trademark line ‘a faggot and an Albanian. Mountain and sea’. Xenia proposes original and engaging approaches to identity and the very image of the migrant without the weight of victimhood and the generic conventions of thrilling or dramatic tales of illegal border-crossing and precarious temporalities in the host nation. ‘Instead of falling into the narcissistic mythology of despair and self-victimisation, [Koutras] depicts self-sufficient subjectivities, whose sense of self is based neither on lack nor on excess but on the usual bundle of irreconcilable contradictions that make all life so interesting, unpredictable and exciting.’40 Koutras’s film is

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a celebration of in-betweenness and hybridity – cinematic, sexual, gender and social – that frustrates expectations and conventions by mixing and appropriating. Like From the Edge of the City, it is profoundly antipatriarchal. Koutras favours the world of queers and strangers and the culture of camp that is certainly not masculine. For Richard Dyer, ‘camp is a way of being human, witty and vital, without conforming to the drabness and rigidity of the hetero male role’.41 In addition to this, Koutras demonstrates a particular taste for and mastering of guilty pleasure aesthetics that very often problematise the straightness of high-art and filmic genres. Queerness and camp are also a way of confronting nationalism and provoking nationalists in order to expose their intolerance. In a crucial sequence that kicks off one of many narrative threads, Dany encounters a group of second-generation Albanian boys. Dany parades his gay sexuality and identity without worry, provoking the boys’ scorn. Under his baseball cap a thick blonde tuft protrudes. He constantly slurps on lollipops and carries around a plush rabbit he feeds and tenderly talks to. Dany wears tight pink trousers and a collar around his neck, bringing to mind drag styling. The boys taunt him, shouting, ‘Bloody faggot . . . look at what has become of our clan.’ They get into a fistfight after Dany offends their male identity and straight sexuality, which young Albanian men like them greatly value and associate with nationality – the clan. Dany does not conform to heterosexual norms and is at odds with the model of the Albanian or Greek male. Like Sasha and Victor in See You, Dany is a rebellious, confused and conflicted character, fatherless and in opposition to the very concept of a straight male father as he finds solace in his gay father-figure, nightclub owner Tassos. One particular dream sequence that pays homage to Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her/Hable con Ella (2002), shows Dany sleeping on a gigantic hairy chest, which later we discover is a childhood memory from when Tassos fostered the boys after the departure of their alleged father. Moreover though, Dany is a migrant and gay character who revels in the in-betweenness and boisterous spirit that make him an emblematic queer subject. The film’s loose plot is put into motion after Dany takes out a gun and shoots one of the Albanian boys. Earlier, Dany came to Athens to announce to Ody their mother’s death, which leaves them without a legal guardian and thus facing deportation. In order to stay in Greece, they need to find their alleged Greek father, a far-right candidate and mobster, whom the boys address as ‘he who must not be named’, bringing to mind a taboo and villainous figure. The symbolic father is firmly linked to citizenship and nationality. At the same time though, he is thrown off his pedestal thanks to the film’s appropriation of camp and queer aesthetics

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Figure 7.4 Dany confronts the symbolic father in Xenia (Koutras 2014).

that ultimately undermine the importance of blood, residence and soil and propose instead a queer inclusive nation against nationalists and fascists, as shown through Dany’s unapologetically clumsy yet impassioned attacks against Greek and Albanian nationalists. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be so quick to annul the importance of citizenship, contrary to nationality, the term that has replaced citizenship in public legislation. Contrary to the Greek returnees of the other films, the duo of Xenia are not taken for Albanians instead of Greeks. They are unquestionably Albanians, even though they have been born and raised on Greek soil, an issue that forecasts national myths, history and ethnicity on a higher level than soil and residence. They should be granted Greek citizenship according to those particular criteria. Yet they reject even this possibility as they leave the father’s house without any answer to the question of their paternity. Ody and Dany reject any affiliation to him and venture back onto the open road beyond discourses of territoriality and citizenship as self-made queer subjects. The boys’ journey from Athens to Thessaloniki will serve as a comingof-age tale and will strengthen the bond between the gay Dany and heterosexual Ody, who learn the value of togetherness and solidarity between siblings, queers, strangers and social pariahs. The journey begins on the premise of the mythical search for the father/nation to the northern borders of Greece, and evolves into a hybrid movie replete with varying encounters that bring to mind and simultaneously undermine mythical

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Greek journeys. Like the Homeric Odysseus (Ody’s name is not coincidental) they set off on unknown terrain full of perils and fantastical encounters to find their (symbolic) home, only to abandon it as they confront the father without getting an answer to the question of their paternity. Their journey is, in addition, reminiscent of that of the two siblings from Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist/Topio stin Omihli (1988), where little Voula and Alexandros cross the wintery landscape of northern Greece towards Germany in order to find their Greek émigré father, who remains unseen and mythical. In contrast though, the siblings of Xenia cast off the father and his symbolic properties and the melancholy of Angelopoulos’s universe which has often proposed an inverse Odyssey that transforms homecoming into a sombre descent into anonymity and homelessness. In Xenia, the exhilarating finale sees Ody and Dany ‘sail’ into the sunset without a father or nation but entirely liberated and, above all, with stronger bonds on the lines that keep queers and strangers united. Indeed, as Karalis notes, Xenia liberates its audience from its pretensions, re-enchants a social world without sublimating myths and finally challenges the boring questions of identity, belonging and memory. In contrast to the gloom and doom atmosphere [of crisis-ridden Greece], it projects images of euphoric self-invention, through accomplished characters and a cinematic language of suggestive non-sequiturs.42

Instead of a messianic and ‘metaphysical source of life’),43 the adolescents of Xenia discover the criminality of the(ir) father, who is linked to the far right and nightclub extortion rings. He is a prototypical paterfamilias, the wealthy father of two kids and husband of a disgruntled housewife – the preferred role for women according to the rhetoric of Golden Dawn.44 Their house is a glass fortress also located at an address with symbolic connotations: Ioanni Metaxa Street – a reference to the eponymous dictator. As though to invert again the heterosexual order of things, Dany calls him out for shaving his chest, addressing him as a ‘faggot’, highlighting the normality of his own sexuality and peculiar brand of masculinity. Dany often reappropriates homophobic language and, in keeping with camp, undermines the seriousness of masculine codes and values. Conversely, Ody and Dany see in Tassos, often referred to as Tassia, and his partner Ahmad a more potent father figure and ideal family – both gay and migrant, camp and adult, anti-nationalist Greek and foreign. Their ur-mother is the diva Patty Bravo, an Italian songstress of the 1980s who appears in several forays into magical realist territory and whose dramatic love songs are the basis for camping out. Arguably, queerness and new dichotomies are political weapons when

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directed to the real enemy, here the father as nation, he who must not be named. In keeping with questions of nationality, citizenship and belonging, the film’s title refers to the treasured myth of filoxenia and the once-thriving Greek hotel chain Xenia, now abandoned and dilapidated buildings. Xenia hotels were part of a state programme to develop tourism and invigorate the Greek economy after World War II that began in the 1950s and ended in the 1970s. Hotels were built around tourist sites and were considered architectural masterpieces. In the 1990s they were abandoned. One important sequence demonstrates how the boys reappropriate a Xenia hotel and turn it into a queer and radically inclusive place of hospitality. As it applies in the tourist industry, the boys’ stay at the abandoned hotel is only a stop on their trajectory, and carries transformative meaning. There, Dany pretends to be the receptionist, welcoming Ody, who has his birthday. The boys shower in the yard with a water hose in a scene that eroticises their naked bodies. At night they celebrate by camping out in their underwear to Paty Bravo, a brief musical interlude that Koutras films in the style of video clips. Dany is lured into the nearby clearing by a giant version of his beloved plush rabbit Dido. This is one of several scenes where Koutras masterfully utilises the codes of magical realism. Dany and Dido share a conversation in which the giant rabbit implies that it is time Dany grew up and matured. It is fascinating what can come of reappropriation of space and cultural artefacts, especially that of an abandoned Xenia hotel which connotes hospitality to strangers – those bringing capital. Here, second-generation Albanians, the strangers within, reclaim their right to hospitality and the director redetermines the function of space itself by injecting Dany’s liberated imagination and the culture of camp. Koutras’s queer reclamation of the urban spaces of belonging is in line with that of street artists who have been exercising urban creativity in abandoned places since the emergence of the financial crisis in 2008. An important characteristic of situated urban creative practices is that ‘they push legal, moral and cultural boundaries by intervening and exploring alternative ways of using, producing, experiencing, and understanding the city’.45 The Xenia Hotels Project took off in May 2017 at abandoned Xenia hotels on several islands and mainland Greece. Athens-based activist and street artist Anna Dimitriou turned the hotels into open exhibition spaces where she drew graffiti on the broken walls. The artist ‘strongly believes that Xenia Hotels may be transformed into cultural beehives by hosting cultural activities and other similar services and institutions’.46 Koutras’s film is one such contribution that asks how we think of hospitality towards our own people, strangers and the whole world.

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Notes 1. Loshitzky (2010), pp. 2–3. 2. For more on the Greek minority of southern Albania and their status during the Hoxha regime, see Mpaltsiotis (2003). 3. Diamanti-Karanou (2003), p. 27. 4. King notes that a crisis in fertility had made the call for repatriation even more pertinent, apart from the staggering presence of foreign migrants (2000). 5. Voutira (2004), p. 534. 6. Papanikolaou (2009), p. 25. 7. Diamanti-Karanou (2003), p. 29. 8. Voutira (2004), p. 535. 9. Rich (2013). 10. Dawson (2015), p. 185. 11. Berghahn (2012), p. 130. 12. Ibid., p. 132. 13. Benshoff and Griffin (2004), p. 7. 14. Papanikolaou (2008), p. 183. 15. Karalis (2015). 16. Sasha’s closest friend, Kotsian, displays the same imagination when he jokes about the sexual benefits of being Russian and Pontian (a Russopontian’s penis has both the size of a Russian’s penis and the girth of a Pontian’s). 17. Berghahn (2012), p. 133. 18. Triandafyllidou (2000), p. 190. 19. Arendt (1958), p. 33. 20. Lazaridis (1999), p. 111. 21. Ibid. 22. Konstantinidou (2001), pp. 93–130. 23. Lazaridis (1999), p. 110. 24. Lazaridis and Psimmenos (2000). 25. Triandafyllidou and Veikou (2002), p. 201. 26. Calotychos (2013), p. 167. 27. Ibid. 28. Derrida (2000b), p. 143. 29. Papanikolaou (2008), p. 184. 30. Ibid., p. 185. 31. Ibid. 32. An ideal example of this tendency to frame the places migrants and refugees inhabit as dystopic and strongholds of criminal organisations is discernible in Dheepan (Audiard 2015), in which a popular banlieue of Paris harbours criminal gangs, making for a thrilling narrative featuring a final showdown between migrants and gang leaders.

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33. On the film’s DVD copy, a blurb by The Movie Chart Show describes the film as ‘a modern Greek tragedy for the club generation’, as though to indicate the film’s hybridity. 34. Tsitsiridis (2019). 35. Papanikolaou (2008), p. 186. 36. Mini (2006b), p. 206. 37. The complaisance of Greek mothers is a subject of fascination with growing currency in contemporary ‘weird wave’ films, particularly Dogtooth and Miss Violence (Avranas 2013), which represent to a good extent the obsession of the weird wave with symbolic fathers. For more on this subject see Kazakopoulou (2016), pp. 187–200. 38. Mini (2006b), p. 219. 39. Incidentally, the two adolescents’ predicament is reinforced by that of the actual actors, Kostas Nikouli and Nikos Gelia, who were facing possible deportation at the time of filming. When Koutras was asked to accept the award for best film at the 2015 Greek Academy of Film Awards, he postponed acceptance until the two actors are granted citizenship. In his speech he mentioned that ‘since life is unfair, we will not take this award with us. Instead, with all due respect to the Greek Academy of Film, we will leave it here and take it when the new nationality legislation for second-generation immigrants is approved.’ (At time of writing, Koutras has not yet been able to accept the award.) Available at https://www.thetoc.gr/politismos/article/ panos-koutras-dwste-ithageneia-gia-na-parw-to-brabeio. Accessed 22 May 2019. 40. Karalis (2015). 41. Dyer (2002), p. 49. 42. Karalis (2015). 43. Ibid. 44. This is an issue that the wives of Golden Dawn MPs collectively agree on, as shown in Golden Dawn: Personal Affair. 45. Stampoulidis (2019), p. 71. 46. Ibid., p. 75.

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C H A PT ER 8

Migration Without a Face

In an opening sequence from Kyriakos Katzourakis’s The Way to the West (2003), documentary footage showing stampeding herds of wildebeest is inserted after a soliloquy by the protagonist Irina, a former sex slave played by Katia Gerou. A sombre melody on the soundtrack accompanying Irina’s wandering is overridden by the sound of the stampeding animals and the scene cuts to a vast plain where thousands of gnu are rushing towards a lake. Superimpositions of falling bombs which threaten the herd as they run to safety symbolise the mass exodus of people in the various war-stricken zones of the Earth. Close-ups on the huddled animals display the terror and sheer hopelessness of a homogeneous mass of defenceless creatures. Some of the animals drown while others slip off the rocks in their attempt to climb out and fall on the corpses of other wildebeest. The scene ends with a close-up on one solitary animal struggling, in slow motion, to escape while the panting breath of Irina, meant to humanise the wretched animal, accompanied by the minor-key soundtrack, amplifies the on-screen tragedy. As the scene fades, Irina collapses on the floor, as though unable to bear witness to the tragedy. Through this affective symbolism, Katzourakis conveys the exodus of refugees as panicked animals crossing the lake, as though referencing the biblical Exodus of the Jews. This brief sequence is emblematic of the main themes addressed in this chapter and of what makes their cinematic appropriation problematic in The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos 1991), Ephemeral Town (Zafiris 2000) and The Way to the West (Katzourakis 2003). The scene is also telling of this chapter’s title. ‘Migration Without a Face’ says a lot about stereotypical perceptions of refugees and mass migration as the departure of faceless and anonymous people en masse, moving ‘in waves’ towards Europe. The term ‘crisis’, which has become a mainstream rubric for the exodus of prospective refugees, exists solely on the premise that refugees are conjured in herds as homogeneous groups moving or being moved (through trafficking and smuggling) from their homelands to the west. Although the pain of forced exile and the deprivation that refugees face in their devastated homelands are unquestionable, representations

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steeped in an imagery of emergency which deem agency a vehicle of tragedy are essential to discourses of humanitarian aid. Despite obvious deviations in their treatment of refugees and mass migration, the three case studies imagine refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants as de facto disenfranchised non-citizens from a peripheral no man’s land. In the sphere of mass migration and the tragedy of mass displacement, all three categories are undifferentiated. This is, however, necessary. Those fleeing imminent threats to their life are fleeing economic instability and poverty as well. Similarly, economic migrants seek a safe environment and can be equally discriminated against in host societies and denied employment. Each group will eventually compete in the job market, most often in clandestine fields. It is necessary, however, to differentiate refugees from the masses of ‘strangers’ in order to ensure their protection. The discussion here will consider cinematic form as a decisive factor but the emphasis will be more on cultural representation, with a particular focus on issues of anonymity and agency. In migration cinema, refugees appear in the background as symbolic victims of globalisation whose voiceless bodies manifest the misery of humanity gone astray and are thus represented ‘in the passivity of their suffering, not in the action they take to confront and escape it’.1 While filmmakers save refugees and their experiences from oblivion, they emphasise vulnerability and precarity2 for ‘refugees are the prototypical face of the emergency’.3 The emergency that Craig Calhoun talks about involves painting refugees as faceless, wounded masses. Angelopoulos in particular goes to great lengths to evoke the tragedy of displacement by portraying refugees as anonymous crowds which appear to be floating in a refugee camp. The colonel of the military regiment at the border, as though outlining the film’s representational strategies, points out that ‘the refugees will declare any name . . . most of them are without papers. Try proving who is who! There is no way to prove anything.’ In this case, refugee representation does not fall in the same category with the teenage refugees of Man at Sea, who protest and stand out from the crowd. Contrary also to popular representations of immigrants as bodies of casual and flexible labour or as travellers, refugees are imagined in a pictorial sense, as faceless and voiceless victims, stranded in dystopian camps, on overcrowded boats and in claustrophobic spaces where they literally suffocate. In the proposed case studies, refugees are par excellence tragic figures, confronted with death on either side of their journey. They occupy a place in the liberal imagination where loss and violence gain a superlative character. This has to do to some extent with the way TV news conjures refugee deaths as a statistic with little background beyond the permanence of death.

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It is also linked to the definition of refugee by the United Nations and the kind of proof required for asylum seekers, which often involves displaying injury from persecution, especially since those granted humanitarian care are the heavily injured and sick.4 Persecution and extreme violence feature prominently in contemporary European cinema and the bodies of refugees have become major sites for compassion and care, thus failing to further a politics of equality based on political struggle. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ provides the necessary critical rigour to comprehend what it means to represent refugees according to the apolitical notion of humanitarian disaster. In Homo Sacer, Agamben asks why ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’ is excluded from life in the ‘mechanisms and calculations of power’.5 Bare life for Agamben is included in politics solely as an exception, exposed to sovereign power rather than included in its mechanisms. In her focus on French immigration laws, Miriam Ticktin points out that humanitarian aid functions as an exception in an otherwise strict regime of migration management. Refugees are thus the exception, treated by regimes of care (NGOs, the military, corporations, international institutions) which emerge beyond the framework of law and politics. This issue, observed in the proposed case studies, was highlighted by Hannah Arendt in her writings on sovereign power. Arendt firmly believed that the universalism of human rights could only be guaranteed through citizenship. For Arendt, the refugee, the figure who should embody human rights, signals instead the concept’s crisis. Bare life remains on the periphery of the political realm because natural life can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of the state, hence her groundbreaking concept of ‘the right to have rights’.6 Agamben detects this issue in the title of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and argues that biological life dissolves into the figure of citizen. Images of hungry refugee children for example are seen as sacred life which can be killed but not sacrificed – vulnerable life, voiceless and stripped of sovereignty, turned object of humanitarian aid and protection. Despite a long interim period, the proposed case studies indicate an overreliance on bare life as excluded from political life. In doing so, they expose the indifference of the state and humanise the newcomers, who are routinely misrepresented. The filmmakers illustrate the pain of displacement and downfall of the west in the emergence of Fortress Europe and the refugee detention centre. The pictorial qualities of filmic refugees make their predicament a far-reaching and universal tragedy, as though our world is one of stranded refugees. Yet this means that systemic violence, which turns citizens into refugees, is disregarded and

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refugees are revealed in terms of non-agency, loss and death, leaving little room for reflection.

The Suspended Lives of Refugees In The Suspended Step of the Stork, a journalist, Alexandros, travels to the border region of Kerkini in northern Greece to make a documentary on a refugee camp situated at the Albanian border. There, a series of encounters transform him from a spectator of suffering to a prospective agent of change. The colonel of a regiment monitoring illegal border-crossings introduces Alexandros to the absurdity of life at the border and to the world of refugees, who occupy an abandoned village where they have been temporarily allocated. While examining TV footage, Alexandros notices a man who resembles a politician who disappeared very unexpectedly after a dramatic exit from the Greek parliament several years back. He sets off to find the solitary refugee and reveal the truth behind his identity. Instead of discovering any truth though, he is confronted with the painful reality of the refugee camp and the tragedy of exile. Alexandros’s expedition thus forces him to reconsider his role as a passive observer of events and people. At the film’s iconic finale, the politician has once again disappeared and Alexandros walks on a road where men in yellow raincoats climb telegraph poles to connect telephone lines across the border and into the horizon − as though building the foundations for a future where communication is achieved across borders. Thirty years later, Angelopoulos’s film is still arguably prophetic. A large fraction takes place in a dystopian refugee camp on the border with Albania, which the locals call ‘the waiting room’. The title conveys suspension as a modus vivendi and affirms Arendt’s claim about the camp as a permanent state of exception, where waiting contradicts the logic of migration as movement. ‘They are waiting to be repatriated elsewhere, and for them that “elsewhere” has acquired a strange meaning . . . mythical.’ The colonel’s words adequately capture the state of suspension faced by refugees in Greek detention centres from the early 2010s. The images of abandonment, bleak setting and reports of death and misery in the film pre-date the so-called ‘jungle’ of Calais in northern France or the Moria camp at Lesbos, yet another ‘waiting room’. With The Suspended Step of the Stork, Angelopoulos injects into the future his vision of a world of refugees: indeed, a key character the former politician and visionary turned refugee played by Marcello Mastroianni, projects the film’s present into the new millennium through the prophetic phrase, ‘Let’s assume that the moment I am writing these lines, it is

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31 December 1999’. Incidentally, these lines are taken from the politican’s book, entitled Melancholy of the End of the Century, which resonates with urgency and uncertainty, as though inviting viewers to rethink the political status quo at the end of the century.7 Today, it seems ironic since the film’s reality, rather than Angelopoulos’s utopian vision of a borderless world, has become an inescapable truth. The ‘waiting room’ functions as a purgatory and heightens the fin de siècle melancholy characteristic of Angelopoulos’s oeuvre from Voyage to Cythera/Taxidi sta Kythira (1984) onward. The director’s second period saw a more emotional engagement with individual protagonists, rather than ‘the large historical forces that shaped modern Greece’8 in his early period. In the second period, wanderers and internal exiles embody the defeat of the left and death of the post-war dream. They are sombre figures who aimlessly drift through space and time, like Bruno Ganz’s Alexander in Eternity and a Day. Set primarily at northern regions like Florina and Kerkini during the winter, the films’ bleak mise-en-scène is a far cry from the image of Greece as an exotic tourist destination and so-called cradle of western civilisation. For Angelopoulos, Greece’s Balkan affiliations were of great significance for aesthetic purposes, expressed through the wintery climate of northern Greece, but even more because the dissolution of communism in the Balkans signalled, for the director, the end of a hopeful era and a historical departure point. The Suspended Step of the Stork marks the first instalment of an unofficial trilogy on borders and border-crossing, which culminated with Eternity and a Day. In the trilogy, the new anonymous masses are not the communist partisans of The Travelling Players/O Thiasos (1975) and The Hunters/Oi Kinigoi (1977), but an anonymous cast of refugees. One particular scene in Eternity and a Day explicates this tendency and Angelopoulos’s pictorial rendering of refugees: at the Albanian border, Alexander escorts the boy towards a gate fortified by a tall fence from which hundreds of tiny black silhouettes literally hang in the balance, symbolising suspension and statelessness. This image is essential to Angelopoulos’s poetic meditation on the loneliness of a world separated by borders. At the same time, Angelopoulos’s distinct representational strategies invite a reading of such images on a larger scale. By eliminating any possibility of emotional identification with refugees, either by avoiding close-ups or by delving into their backstories, so not providing any sense of closure, Angelopoulos focuses on the larger theme of displacement per se as a universal predicament. The pictorial and social rather than the psychological aspect of character ‘turns the immigrants’ visual rendering into group formations that resemble those of a chorus’.9 It is characteristic of the director’s application of Brechtian distantiation, which renders moot

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the presence of a hero who asserts his place within a natural landscape. In Angelopoulos’s cinema, it is not people who dominate a landscape but the other way around. In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the landscape is marked by man-made borders and those guarding them who transform native people into refugees.The actors in the scene become part of the landscape and the image thus addresses the viewer as a whole, rendering them part of a larger iconography of displacement. In the film, the multiplication of borders across the Balkans after the fall of communism is the mark of a new world order, sealed by the reemergence of the camp. The most potent manifestations of this new world order are anonymous and innumerable refugees, as the colonel tells Alexandros: ‘Refugees from various neighbouring and other countries . . . men, women, children . . . Poles, Romanians, Iranians, Kurds, Albanians, Turks.’ In the camp, life is reduced to its bare biological components, lived on the border between Greece and Albania, Kerkini and mainland Greece. In Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos’s preoccupation with borders was of an existential nature, but here we see the actual lines drawn on bridges which are meant to connect but are paradoxically separate. They create a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere’ or an ‘other side’, as the colonel describes in the film’s opening. Besides bridges, rivers that flow through the land become geographical barriers between Greece and Albania, demonstrating thus the randomness and multiplication of borders after communism. This is eloquently displayed during the wedding sequence, which sees groom and bride respectively in Albania and Greece with a river flowing between. The interstitial location of the waiting room and its state of exception from political and social life drive dystopia deeper and build layers of inbetweenness, as though to illustrate the randomness and power of borders, as illustrated in the politician’s eloquent soliloquy: ‘We’ve passed the borders but we’re still here. How many frontiers do we have to pass to get home?’ The question of ‘here’ and ‘home’ depends on the frontiers crossed and to be crossed, which means that the journey continues ad infinitum − as we saw with Eternity and a Day. The possibility of ever finding a home is entirely lost. Instead, the refugees find themselves within a state of non-belonging and transience frozen in time. Life in the camp is governed by the notion of waiting, which also highlights a greater preoccupation with the ‘not yet’. For Makrygiannakis, this is the question of what comes after 31 December 1999; a world of mobile subjects defined by the ability to cross borders as cosmopolitan dwellers who gain visibility beyond official discourses of belonging. The ‘not yet’ foresees the creation of a revolutionary language of communication that ‘can freely cross, and thus deny national and political borders’10

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and according to which ‘the subject is not defined by static identities of being but becomes part of a social flow of doing’,11 offering the possibility of social change. The prospect of radical change is discerned in the politician’s literary work, in which he ponders on ‘the cues by which we could spark a new collective dream’. As a seer, he tells the tale of humanity’s ‘great migration’ to the refugee boy who eagerly waits for the story’s closure, unaware that it is up to him to write the end, as Alexandros tells him. Absence of closure extends the film into the ‘not yet’, that which could materialise through the social flow of ‘doing’, in other words collective action rather than passive observation. The refugees play a key role in realising this not only as anonymous empty canvasses of a new community, but also as signifiers of suspension as they wait for a utopia that may never materialise. In this respect, they are not agents of change but a silent chorus that emphasises the misery of the world at the end of an era. In the film’s visual present, as opposed to its semantics of a ‘not yet’, the refugees signify loss of agency. The mise-en-scène of abandoned train carriages enhances the sense of stagnation and frames refugees in additional layers of stasis. In the framework of stasis and suffering endured by refugees, a new collective dream is urgent yet eternally longed for. Thus, the camp becomes at once a temporary place of residence and a bleak present from which humanity will depart in the prophesised great migration (the obscure desert the politician mentions to the boy). More, it serves as the backdrop of the refugees’ plight, which simultaneously restricts them and accentuates suspension. A three-minute sequence during the first quarter makes suspension tangible and paints the camp as a prominent feature as it brings the non-agency of refugees to the foreground. Alexandros and crew arrive and set up a TV camera on the rails. ‘Are you filming?’ Alexandros asks as we approach the camera operator looking through the camera. The scene cuts to display what is being filmed. While the crew are filming, what the audience sees is a poetic rendering of the scene through the lens of Angelopoulos’s camera, filmed in a single lateral tracking shot of one minute and fifty-two seconds. We are given an objective shot shown, however, as the subjective gaze of Alexandros and his crew. The scene’s double register is characteristic of a tendency to blur the borders between fiction and documentary, an issue accentuated by the presence of actual refugees in this sequence. We are thus further denied certainty and closure on the ontology of identity or the ontology of form, as is the case with Mastroianni’s ex-politician.12 In every aspect, Brechtian distantiation denies the certainty of a ‘here’ or ‘there’, a ‘then’ or ‘now’. This ‘crisis’ is beyond the artifice of the screen. It is another way of inviting viewers to bring closure rather than remain passive spectators.

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Figure 8.1 A group of refugees tightly framed within immobile train carriages in The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos 1991).

The tracking shot displays in minimalistic fashion groups of refugees dressed in rags sitting in tightly framed openings inside train carriages. The non-diegetic waltz on the soundtrack amplifies the pervading melancholy evident in the grey colours and mist. As a minimalist composition, it augments the mise-en-scène of recurring frames, still refugees and wooden surfaces that appear in the waltz’s repetitive time signature. The slow and ritualistic movement, in addition to the austere mise-en-scène, conveys the stagnation of life in the camp as though the refugees are caught in a vicious cycle. The mobile shot is performed in stark contrast to the image of trapped refugees on once mobile carriages. This is a scene of abandonment where refugees and train carriages have been dumped. Contrary to the Nazi death camps or the detention centre of Guantanamo Bay which has regularly featured in post 9/11 Hollywood films, the waiting room is a location of abandonment where people live in a state of flux. Refugees are dumped in the same way that clothing from charity is dumped from a truck for refugee children in the next shot. Towards the end of the shot, testimonies by refugees are inserted in the voice-over. The disembodied voices of Kurdish, Albanian and Iranian refugees speaking in their native tongues narrate the panicked escape from warfare and persecution in their homelands. While their stories play in the voice-over, the scene cuts to the camp’s entrance where a truck enters and drops clothes for children, who run like a herd while Alexandros and crew approach, filming the scene in the background. The passive inaction

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of Alexandros as a spectator of suffering, who eventually proclaims ‘all I knew was to film others without caring for their feelings’, symbolises the general lack of compassion and political engagement characteristic of an intellectual, and a form of political impoverishment which Angelopoulos detects in the world at the end of the century. The disembodied voice-over of real-life testimonies privileges the greater picture rather than giving a face to the plight of actual refugees. In other words, the scene indicates the impossibility of singling out one protagonist from an entire nation of displaced people. The ambiguity of Mastroianni’s character also makes it hard to view him as a representative protagonist of one community. Angelopoulos thus lifts the image of the refugee into a universal portrayal of displacement in order to ultimately declare that ‘we are all immigrants within the regulated border traffic of our modern lives’.13 The audio montage has a double register as on the one hand it tells a certain truth (the threat of chemical weapons in Kurdistan, the criminalisation of border-crossing in Albania, political and military turmoil in Iran) and on the other paints ‘a multi-cultural fresco built on different languages’.14 By placing additional audible layers to an iconography of refugees as anonymous and homogeneous markers of loss, Angelopoulos reinforces the film’s pictorial allure.

The Recurring Trope of Violence and Death Refugees in The Suspended Step of the Stork are background figures who embody the film’s thematic preoccupations. As a silent chorus bereft of agency they appear in a state of exception, as though trapped in an alternate space and time. Their status is simultaneously a symptom of modernday Fortress Europe and the director’s pictorial rendition of mass migration. They are granted a constricted frame of visibility according to a hierarchy of victimhood. Indeed, they reveal themselves either in their quotidian misery often accompanied by outbursts of eruptive violence or in death. The film’s opening sequence is characteristic of an overreliance on death as a sign of the emergency. The opening voice-over of Alexandros accompanies the image of two bodies floating in the port of Piraeus. He mentions that during his journey to Kerkini he kept thinking of the bodies of two Asian refugees who unexpectedly jumped to their deaths after being discovered on a ship and denied asylum by Greek authorities. The camera approaches enough to reveal two black silhouettes carried by the waves, while two hovering helicopters produce a droning sound and form a geometric frame. This provides a first indication of the film’s clinical approach to migrant death, typical of Angelopoulos’s trademark Brechtian

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distantiation. Arguably, the opening scene is telling of the increasingly draconian and exclusionary measures meant to curb immigration as well as the indifference of the international community. Anonymity allows very little in the form of identification, negating an emotional response. Our attention is thus not directed towards the dead refugees as much as to the impetus for their flight and encounter with Fortress Europe, as Alexandros wonders ‘I kept thinking [. . .] about their determination to jump to their own deaths [. . .] how does one leave? Where to? Why?’ At the same time that Angelopoulos denotes the urgency and impetus of their flight and the profound gravitas behind refugee suicide, the scene emphasises silence and death as salient features of refugees. Their death is mentioned in passing, while its unexpected suddenness places the event within a temporality of violence functioning as a rupture. By reproducing victimhood as a mainstay of refugees, Angelopoulos hinders his hopeful vision of a new collective dream and instead remains firmly within the framework of embodied protest. What’s more, this means that a new collective dream is imagined according to a hierarchy of suffering, especially since every character or group in the film experiences border syndrome in varying ways. The colonel and politician, for instance, appear dejected, performing poetic soliloquies on the absurdity of borders as the drunken colonel mentions to Alexandros in a spirit of camaraderie ‘I told you that people here went insane . . . it’s the borders, the limits that drive us insane’. He appears as a deranged holy fool, one with greater agency and poetic resonance than the refugees. At the same time, the latter are not given the space to articulate their plight, which the colonel does on their behalf. Tragic death and self-inflicted pain render refugees citizens of a new humanity based on their silence and propensity to violence, which makes them ideal subjects for humanitarian aid.15 Their suffering appears as metaphysical and without an obvious perpetrator – it simply occurs, an issue that enhances the film’s poetic evocation of existential malaise while obscuring the political and historical temporality of migrant-related violence. The refugees are sufferers caught in temporalities of crisis and need. According to Ticktin, a hierarchy of suffering has come to determine the right to asylum for the patient rather than the citizen, to the ‘morally legitimate suffering bodies’16 emerging as bare life. Ticktin asks who is granted this ‘paradoxically privileged position of the most disenfranchised, the most wretched of the earth, the most worthy of care? And what political realities are reproduced or dependent on this figure?’17 The refugees who gain visibility and a storyline in Angelopoulos’s film are granted them on the premise of suffering, eruptive violence and death, factors that make them ideal subjects of protection in the framework

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of humanitarian disasters: a Kurd who slits his wrist, a lonely Albanian woman bound by patriarchal custom, an orphan boy and a group of wailing mourners who make audible the misery of the world. Their suffering is taken at face value and thus injury and insurmountable tragedy become the basis of their political identity, allocating them roles as perpetrators or sufferers of violence. Nevertheless, suffering and death lend themselves well to the iconographic and semantic universe of Angelopoulos’s second period, as they heighten the overwhelming melancholy his characters suffer. This form of urgency calls for immediate action against violence, with little time for reflection. Although the film does invite audiences to contemplate the absurdity and multiplication of borders in the Balkans and their near metaphysical nature − manifest in their ubiquity and grip over all inhabitants of the ‘waiting room’ – I argue that one is not able to reflect on dead refugees whose deaths gain little resonance outside the sphere of inexplicable tragedy. According to Michelle Aaron, audiences may be filled with a sense of ‘moral-ideological rectitude’ and ponder on the parallels between on-screen death and what happens in society as a whole. ‘We are able to recognize what is awful or wrong but that is usually all’, Aaron claims.18 In this respect we can see how from 1991, before migration cinema gained popularity and academic currency, Eurocentric ideology assigned to western characters a layered understanding of border subject as a more privileged sufferer of existential malaise, while refugees are brought to the forefront through events that signal a permanent state of (embodied) crisis. A brief sequence involving a man accused of betraying the Kurdish resistance exemplifies the film’s problematic recourse to violence. One hour in, Alexandros follows the young Albanian woman to a café in the town. They have shared their mutual affection in a romantic interlude, at which point we learn that she is betrothed to a man over the border. As we observe the scene in the café, a group of men get into a brawl. The incident literally breaks the silence like an eruption. One of the men calls out to his assailant ‘Dog! Son of a bitch! Informer!’ The latter bends down, dramatically exclaiming ‘I am not an informer!’ and cuts his own wrist with a razor. Blood runs down his hand as he shouts ‘Blood! Blood!’ The group rushes him out, exclaiming ‘Doctor! Quickly, a doctor’, highlighting the refugee’s inescapable links to medical care. The scene quickly closes as the chorus exits the scene through the left corner of the frame, hinting at the theatrical and separate allocation of such events in the background. The scene cuts to the exterior where, instead of the wounded refugee, we follow Alexandros, who is looking for the woman. As the shocking rupture of self-inflicted injury fades, we are

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Figure 8.2 A Kurdish refugee slits his wrist in protest over accusations of betrayal in The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos 1991).

reminded that migrants and refugees gain visibility outside the realm and mechanisms of history and politics. Migrant-related violence is reproduced ‘until it takes on truth value, a truth that is repeated until its resonance dies’.19 The brawl is not an isolated event but part of an escalating vendetta. Six minutes later, Alexandros rushes to the waiting room, where the accused informer has been hanged. The following dialogue ensues between Alexandros and colonel, indicating the eruptive and inexplicable eventfulness of refugee death. Alexandros: What happened? Colonel: Chaos. Damn if I get it. They crossed the borders to be free and built new borders here in this mud pit and made the world smaller. And then they don’t speak . . . the law of silence. Nobody knows if it’s between Christians and Muslims, Kurds and Turks or between revolutionaries and opportunists.

The camera moves up towards the hook of a crane and lingers for several seconds on the spectacle of the hanging refugee. Brechtian distantiation maintains a measure of distance, positing the refugee’s death as symptomatic of the madness of borders that refugees themselves draw in the host nation. An honour crime is depicted here, something which features often in European media as a threat imported from refugees’ devastated homelands. The event, however, is treated by Angelopoulos with the same sensationalism as in the media, despite lack of sensational tactics (close-ups, dramatic soundtrack). Its inexplicable, sudden and painful occurrence enhances the

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‘chaos’ of the camp, bringing to mind reports of chaotic riots in Moria or the ‘Jungle’ of Calais in France, resounding with urgent calls for police and humanitarian intervention. The crane is lowered while a group of women arrive from the top left corner and surround the body. They cry, chant and gesticulate in a ritualistic manner, a sight which Alexandros observes in bewilderment while a train arrives from which the politician’s wife disembarks. Alexandros welcomes her and disappears. The camera lingers on the group of mourners whose persistent and incomprehensible wailing magnifies the scene’s urgency and dread. The abruptness of both scenes involving the anonymous Kurd, the sense of tragedy and loss implied, magnify the colonel’s bewilderment, highlighted by the phrase ‘damn if I get it’, which offers an appropriate point of view since these ruptures happen for reasons difficult to comprehend. They are near metaphysical, leaving no other alternative but to retreat into silence. Silence is an overarching theme. The silence of Mastroianni’s politician, who unexpectedly abandons his post to ‘become’ an internal refugee, the silence of the chorus and, ultimately, of Angelopoulos who inserts his own sense of defeat into Mastroianni’s character. The late director articulates this very rejection of politics in an interview: I do not accept it, but I have to face it. What can I do? For a very long time we used to dream that politics was not a profession; it was a creed, a faith, an ideal. But in recent years, I have become convinced politics is nothing more than just another profession, that’s all.20

Figure 8.3 Brechtian distantiation: the Kurdish refugee hanging in the distance in The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos 1991).

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Thus, in times of political, intellectual and social impoverishment, the only alternative is silence and anonymity, which further point to the death of identity. The politician’s silence is indicative of this. The defeat of the left and struggle for a ‘new collective dream’ points to the end of history and the end of collective idealism. Celik thus argues that history no longer moves through collective class struggles, but ‘through ruptures of catastrophes’, a temporality that implicitly involves the representation of ethnic and racial Others: ‘It is a conception of history moving through disasters that are at the crux of European eventfulness (major media scandals such as events of criminality, riots and honour killings), involving refugees, migrants and minorities.’21 Migrant-related violence and death bookend the sequence shot. Cuts to settings separate from the geographically and temporally distant waiting room remind us of the honour killings and riots in refugee camps that feature routinely in news reports. These moments are incidental happenings in the ‘while’ of the sequence shot. Violence and death, in other words, punctuate the sequence shot and happen without any consequence. This state of crisis is overrepresented and the underrepresented elements, in other words the causes and events surrounding a state of crisis throughout time, are silenced. Moreover, the refugees are outside Alexandros’s agency and quest. Our focus is therefore on the trajectory of the protagonist, who exists on a higher plane and whose fictional facets are in stark contrast to the verisimilitude of the refugees, who are revealed in the essential truth of violence and suffering. The extreme temporalities of these events, combined with the continuity of the long take, which has the capacity to capture truthfulness as Bazin has shown, indicate their relevance to the documentary genre. The long take is indeed often associated with realist narration as it can give a sense of unmediated immediacy. By avoiding close-ups and montage, the details within the scene remain indeterminate and without focus, inserting a sense of ambiguity that turns the audience into onlookers rather than active participants. Here, audiences are voyeurs of quotidian misery, unable to do anything for a dead refugee shown in a long take which moves our gaze away from rather than close to the hanging body. Angelopoulos denies his audience the role of saviours. Instead, we are invited to create ‘a new collective dream’ outside the film’s universe. Nevertheless, documentarism renders the refugees in verisimilitude and essentialist terms, especially since the actors are actual immigrants.

On Home, Homecoming and Homelessness: Ephemeral Town At the core of Ephemeral Town is a journey of homecoming which gradually transforms into a sombre journey of homelessness. It deals implicitly with

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the protagonist’s painful separation from the home and its engendered rendering as maternal hearth. Ephemeral Town lends itself to Naficy’s ‘chronotopes of imagined homelands’, which describes how exilic filmmakers conjure a utopian home and Bakhtinian time-space through an emphasis on territoriality, open spaces and haptic visuality and structures of feeling. They ‘encode, embody, and imagine the home, exile, and transitional sites in certain privileged chronotopes that link the inherited space-time of the homeland to the constructed space-time of the exile and diaspora’.22 Being faithful to the cultural and political zeitgeist of Greek migration cinema, Ephemeral Town involves an indigenous protagonist whose alienation from the original home is reflected in the displacement of refugees and migrants portrayed as de facto disenfranchised boat-people.23 The film’s ethnic ‘Others’ articulate the protagonist’s incurable yearning while mirroring the film’s central themes around homelessness. While the protagonist is a layered and enigmatic individual, the refugees set the standard of exile. Thus, Ephemeral Town is best understood as a case study of otherness as a mirror of the self. Yorgos Zafiris, however, deals with the subject in a similar register as Angelopoulos, as the scattered masses of anonymous refugees are portrayed with the same poetic affect as in The Suspended Step of the Stork. Indeed, while in Chapter Six (which deals with the ‘Other’ as a mirror) an individual refugee or migrant bonds with a Greek protagonist, here refugees and migrants are situated in the background of a highly stylised mise-en-scène, as a chorus whose refrain is the ephemeral nature of home in the age of mass migration. In other words, they convey marginality and disenfranchisement as defining features of Greek identity. Andreas Mandragos, an ageing mournful man, sets off to an unknown and obscure island to find the house where his mother was born. She died in 1943 and Andreas never knew her. From the outset, Zafiris sets into motion a journey of homecoming and, arguably, home-discovery, whereby home is imagined as maternal hearth and womb – the original place of birth. Like Alexandros, Andreas is confronted with an existential void rather than a foundational truth. The film is divided into four parts. Part One, ‘The Island’, opens on the sparsely populated island. At the municipality’s registration offices Andreas discovers that all documents from 1943 were lost after a devastating earthquake. He sets off to the mother’s village and wanders until he crashes his bicycle and is presumably unconscious. Part Two, ‘The Fable’, is an oneiric sequence during which long takes, distorted lenses, filters and jagged angles paint a serene landscape of golden wheat fields where a migrant family lives. The scene resembles a prelapsarian Eden where the father plays with his son among stacks of straw lying below white rustling sheets. The painterly quality and religious features of the landscape establish the setting as a migrant nativity.

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Andreas’s mother appears at various points in evocative superimpositions, drifting through the fields, adding to the impression of a bucolic fable and dream. The long static shots of rustling wheat fields combined with the image of an army platoon marching from over the horizon to drive away the migrants additionally evoke the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), where the serenity of an otherworldly landscape combined with an uncanny ‘calm before the storm’ convey the sense of an impending apocalypse. Like the Zone, the island is cut off from the real world as a utopian chronotope. While the ending credits mention Lemnos and Lesbos, these locations are not mentioned during the film. The frequent reference to fuel shortages and interruption of deliveries illustrate further the island’s non-placeness and utopian allure. Andreas meets the mayor’s daughter, Maria, who acts like the Stalker in the eponymous film, and guides Andreas to the village, Lithari, since he is disoriented and lost as he mentions, adding to his displacement. In the final part, entitled ‘the mother’s house’, Andreas discovers that the village, a long coastal strip where children play and climb on cedar trees, has transformed into a temporary haven for migrants and refugees. A local resident reveals how the earthquake probably brought down the mother’s house, which was subsequently consumed by the sea. Lack of closure drives dystopia deeper as Andreas admits that ‘it’s like it [the home] never even existed’. That evening, Andreas shares a meal with the newcomers and spends the night aimlessly wandering. The last two shots demonstrate migrant families stacked on a small boat departing at dawn and Andreas floating in a rowing boat on the beach. Andreas is consumed by the memory of his mother. Like Marenglen in Plato’s Academy, he carries a faded photograph of his mother that no one recognises. In similar fashion, this feature finds its theoretical correspondence in Barthes’s sombre meditations on the ontology of the photograph. Here, we see how based on an epistemological hierarchy, an Albanian migrant’s obsession with the fading memory of his mother gains little salience beyond narrative purposes. In Ephemeral Town, the (Greek) mother emerges out of the photograph during ‘The Fable’ and her memory becomes prominent through haptic visuality, an essential feature of accented films which helps convey the emotional registers of exile. In other words, the film conveys in sequences replete with visual splendour, Andreas’s longing for the mother, who even in the flesh is young and dreamy while Marenglen’s longing for a lost mother is incorporated in the Greek protagonist’s emotional trajectory. Ephemeral Town is ‘primarily concerned with Andreas’s introspective wandering rather than the socioeconomically motivated travel of the immigrant characters’.24

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The mother drifts in several instances while Andreas, old and weary, watches her youthful presence pass him by. In others, she bends over the landscape in extreme close-ups and beautifully constructed superimpositions, which underline the concept of home-as-mother and the longing for the mother as a reunification with nature. In the dreamy and obscure natural settings of the island, the only structural authority is nature, serene and pristine yet terrifying in its boundlessness and uncanny force (earthquakes, rising tides, the vastness of the sea and landscape). As though adhering to the conventions of homecoming chronotopes and exilic cinema, Zafiris returns to the structural certainty and universality that ‘only nature seems capable of providing’.25 Here, it is possible to substitute the village and maternal hearth with an ephemeral utopia of solidarity between an estranged Greek and migrants at a makeshift ephemeral structure set up by the newcomers. They share a meal and the same roof for one night but this new community is ephemeral and the migrants’ departure thus inevitable. Zafiris establishes the ephemeral nature of home in the final section. The film’s ephemeral town is not only the symbolic village but also the migrant settlement, which floods in a sequence where rain dripping from plasticsheet rooftops creates an audible and visual landscape of tranquillity, highly reminiscent of the rain as a cleansing and soothing manifestation of nature as God in Tarkovsky’s films. Gone is the mother’s house, while the village in the dystopian present is reorganised by the refugees, ideal figures of the ephemeral. Their presence and the urgency of an inescapable dystopia of displacement is shown in a sequence which, similarly to Angelopoulos’s panoramic shots of stranded migrants on fences in Eternity and a Day or the closing sequence shot in The Suspended Step of the Stork, opens the frame to the bigger picture: en route to Lithari, Maria reveals the painful truth and articulates the central thesis of this part: Maria: There are many strangers [kseni] on the island . . . refugees, immigrants. They keep arriving on rotting boats. Andreas: And they stay in Lithari? Maria: Wherever they can find. But Lithari is just a crossing. They stay for a few days and then they are taken away.

They descend towards Lithari and the camera pans out to demonstrate a convoy of men, women and children heading down the mountain. The scene opens up and functions as a panoramic establishing shot, one of the few moments in the film without camera filters, distorting angles or symbolic affect. The choice of shot reinforces the exclusive allocation

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of migrants and refugees to documentarism. This is the bigger picture of the ephemeral, a signifying image of mass migration revealed in verisimilitude.26 Maria’s words echo those of Angelopoulos’s colonel (‘try proving who is who’), particularly the term ‘kseni’, which translates both as ‘foreigners’ and ‘strangers’, highlighting thus the anonymity and marginality of migrants and refugees on the island. The same term is repeated by the local mayor in a racist rant claiming that ‘the strangers are removing the foundations. They are changing the markers of the earth. The old is forgotten and the new sets in.’ In addition, the clerk at the registration office mentions in a soliloquy ‘can you read the earth without signs? You gaze at the field and claim that from here to that rock is mine. Take the rock away and what are you left with?’ Ephemeral Town is a meditation on all things ephemeral at a time of growing globalisation. Zafiris displays a visceral fascination with the ephemeral and particularly with the ‘failure of personal and historical memory’,27 the extinction of the home as a marker of man’s place on the earth and its profound effect on national identity. The fact that no one recognises Andreas’s mother on the photograph and the disappearance of documents proving her presence hint at the death of history and identity and Greece’s fraught relationship to its post-1940 history, which additionally influenced ‘its place on the Earth’. After crashing his bike, Andreas

Figure 8.4 An objective establishing shot renders the masses of refugees in essentialist terms in Ephemeral Town (Zafiris 2000).

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loses the photograph and the encounter with the refugees signals a greater and all-encompassing sensation of loss and marginality, making the photograph arguably less important. The encounter introduces the ‘Other’ as a mirror of Andreas. Indeed, the final shot parallels the migrants’ departure to open sea with that of Andreas drifting in shallow water. The Greek protagonist is thus associated with migrants, who are de facto searching for an anchoring to the earth and arguably a home at Lithari. While Andreas is at home, emotionally he is in exile and the motivations of the migrant families are under-represented. Conversely, what is overrepresented is their victimhood, in contrast the protagonist’s introspection. Indeed, the film sets a standard by asserting a hierarchy between victimhood and marginality: Andreas’s marginality in twenty-first-century Greece is signalled the moment he comes in contact with the masses of strangers, who signal homelessness on a higher register. At the end, Andreas drifts, a moment resonating with poetic gravitas. The strangers, however, are left to orbit the Earth on the open sea, a location stereotypically associated with refugees in the western imagination. As a journey of homecoming, Ephemeral Town plays on the myth of Ulysses and incorporates the migrants’ temporality in the sphere of myth. Indeed, the film opens with the figure of the postmodern Ulysses, whose return marks a growing nostalgia for home, Ulysses’s ‘nostos’. Andreas

Figure 8.5 Wretched ‘boat people’ departing again to open sea in Ephemeral Town (Zafiris 2000).

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crosses the sea to reach the island. However, the ending signals a reversal of mythical roles as the strangers depart on a winding indefinite search for home. The film’s masses are thus incorporated in the sphere of (Greek) myth and gain salience merely as a contemporary rendition of boatpeople, with little to show outside these features. Although they are granted a poetic allure akin to myth,28 they are fixed within the confines of victimhood. An elderly resident reinforces the link between home and victimhood: ‘After the earthquake, nobody set foot down here . . . only these wretched ones. Tomorrow they will take them away and there will be no one left.’ The closing shot of migrant families stacked on a small boat has become a mainstay in filmic and mediatised illustrations of the ‘crisis’. Although their departure is heralded by news of the approaching platoon, it comes across as fatalistic and fortifies the non-placeness that typically surrounds refugees and migrants as permanent dwellers. This is the fate of films which mourn over the tragedy of displacement: Beautiful and poetic as they may be, they fail to empower migrants and refugees and, instead, maintain their peripheral placement in Fortress Europe.

The Burden of Representation and Hybridity: The Way to the West With The Way to the West, Kyriakos Katzourakis sets the foundations for an ethical code of migrant representation. He achieves this by adopting a hybrid mode of address which challenges the binary logic of the previous case studies. As a docudrama cross-pollinated by other art forms, ranging from stage performance to painting and ‘talking-head’ documentary, Katzourakis’s film puts to the test established frameworks of visibility and mass migration as the movement of impoverished hordes. By giving them a voice, Katzourakis humanises them and moreover provides a commentary on minority representation. Nevertheless, an overt focus on the deadend aspect of the journey transforms the film into a morality tale. In doing so, the conventions of melodrama reinforce victimhood and in particular the tragic agency of trafficked women. Earlier observations persist as we are asked to feel compassion on the premise of the suffering masses. Katzourakis’s film opens with a disclaimer that underlies a thoughtprovoking approach to migrant representation. In her opening monologue, Irina addresses the camera: Why should I tell you what I wanted when I was a child? What will you do about it, become my friend? No, we don’t have the time to become friends. You ask the occasional question, every twenty minutes. By then I’ve lost my train of thought. You fire

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a question at me? You interrupt me and you do all the talking. You come here out of interest checking my misfortune? You don’t come at all? That too is a problem. So, no matter what happens, it’s still a problem. Maybe because my situation is very intense, it’s not normal.

Katzourakis outlines the double-edged knife of migrant representation and acknowledges the pitfalls of hegemonic filmmaking. Indeed, at another instant, a refugee exclaims that ‘if you never lived as a refugee, you can never portray our life in a film’.29 These words convey the ethical premise of exilic cinema and the film’s exciting and politically charged preoccupation with the burden of representation. The latter is a major theme which I will briefly address, before adopting a more critical approach to the film’s portrayal of mass migration. For Katzourakis, filmmakers often neglect important aspects of the migrant experience and thus miss the bigger picture, all the while assuming they understand what it means to live in exile. ‘It is better to accept that you do not know someone rather than create a fake image of that person. It has to do with stereotypes.’30 Katzourakis here articulates the burden of representation and simultaneously the ethical foundations of exilic cinema. The refugee’s cautionary words deny the possibility of an authentic depiction of exilic life by an indigenous filmmaker. In other words, Katzourakis acknowledges his privileged position of enunciation and the importance of an ethically informed mode of address in providing justice to strangers, who are routinely misrepresented in mainstream media outlets. Nonetheless, Katzourakis is not concerned with an ‘authentic’ depiction of life in exile, an all in all erroneous term. His film instead pays homage to ‘all those who are forced to leave their homeland’, as the closing dedication states. He achieves this by eschewing narrative conventions and hegemonic representation, giving instead a voice to a wide spectrum of migrants and refugees, all the while hybridising the formal conventions of documentary and genre films. To understand how Katzourakis deals with this methodological issue, it is necessary to unpack the film’s layered narrative and form as they pose challenges to the very question of representation. It is thus critical to understand how hybridity challenges binary thought. The Way to the West initially began as a theatrical monologue entitled ‘Do You Like Brahms?’, written by Katzourakis and playwright Maro Douka, featuring Katia Gerou as Irina, a Russian woman lured by the prospect of domestic work in Greece and eventually trapped in the sex industry. Gradually, Katzourakis incorporated the performance into the film, beside documentary footage, interviews and a fictional narrative

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documenting Irina’s search for Xenia, a woman she bonded with in captivity. The film’s formal hybridity is frontal and determines how the director handles the question of migrant representation. An attempt to classify the film, slippery as it might be, would lead the researcher to Bill Nichols’s ‘performance mode’, which calls into question the foundations of traditional documentary film31 and raises doubts about the boundaries that have traditionally been established by fiction films. It centres on expressiveness, poetry and rhetoric, rather than on the desire for realistic representation, making room for avant-garde formal tactics and hybridity.32 What changed the direction of the initial project was realising that ‘one cannot talk about trafficking of women without including all other uprooted people’.33 To manage this, Gerou became acquainted with migrants and refugees and interviewed them.34 During these scenes she appears as herself, Katia, rather than her on-screen persona, maintaining thus a measure of distance which further hybridises the mode of address. Gradually, ‘Do You Like Brahms?’ turned into The Way to the West and Irina turned from a protagonist into a ‘suffering angel’, overlooking the multitude of ‘Others’, showing compassion and solidarity.35 Indeed, the opening sequence of stampeding wildebeests inserted between her performances indicates the links between Irina/Katia and a nation of displaced people as though she is omnipresent. This is a radical departure from the migrant ‘Other’ as an otherworldly tragic hero or simply a mirror of the self. Irina is imagined as a holy saint, incorporating the figure of Mary, holy of holies (Panagia), mother of Jesus and here holy mother of displaced people. Only this is not a Greek character, but the daughter of a middle-class Russian family of communists, as fictionalised by Katzourakis. Irina incorporates Katia and the performer incorporates the fictional rendition of Irina, a trafficked woman who hanged herself while in captivity in Athens. At the same time, Irina/ Katia is a hybrid vehicle through which the audience becomes acquainted with migrants and refugees. Irina and Katia are there and simultaneously are not. The multitude of anonymous ‘Others’ appear alongside the central storyline of Irina’s search. At the same time, they do not orbit the protagonist as mirrors and silent sufferers. Their stories gain salience beyond Irina’s recollections of her time in captivity, longing of home and the tragedy that befell her in the west. Katzourakis delves into the stories and lives of refugees and migrants who made the journey, he adorns them by displaying scenes of sociality that challenge the miserabilism typically associated with migrants and refugees. These scenes carry the seed of an alternative society based on the strength of human relations. Sociality, a term widely debated in cultural anthropology, has been recently defined by Long and Moore ‘as a dynamic and interactive relational matrix through

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which human beings come to know the world they live in and find their purpose and meaning within it’.36 In this case, the human beings are migrants and refugees, who find each other in spaces which transform into a domain of togetherness, a place that implicitly involves Greeks as seen in the film. During one striking sequence, a Pakistani man ponders the notion of illegality and wonders whether his children, second-generation migrants, are ‘illegal births’. An African man addresses the camera and says ‘I’m not an immigrant. I’m Greek. I’m from Crete. A Cretan’, and bursts into laughter. At other moments, the audience is taken through the homes of migrants where children play and dance in slow motion, a movement that Katia repeats on the stage in multiple cuts. So, while the film opens with a crude metaphor of the ‘impoverished hordes’, it delves into their stories, gives them a voice and humanises them in ways that fiction films have failed to do. Scenes of sociality and a language of solidarity shared by migrants, refugees and Irina, a different category of displaced woman, convey the importance of solidarity networks between all displaced people in the host society and further paint a multicultural fresco, celebrating cultural exchange and horizontal relations. This is homage to the newcomers and a multicultural Athens. As Irina outlines in the voice-over, ‘the best moments for me are with others I don’t know – where they are from, what they do or how old they are. They get together at night and they form something like homeland nests’. The concept of home away from home, shared networks of belonging among the displaced, prioritise the agency of migrants and refugees and the value of community in exile. During her wandering in the film’s first quarter, Irina reveals the emotional toll of her desperate search for Xenia. The camera then moves to a near-by apartment where undocumented migrants stay. The voice-over dissolves into that of a Pakistani man who outlines a greater burden, that of all the other newcomers who have endured deportation, police brutality and detention, as though sharing Irina/Katia’s burden in a show of solidarity: [A] hundred to a hundred and fifty people [. . .] came here. They entered Greece illegally, crossed the border and have no passports. But if you look at it differently, it is a hundred and fifty human tragedies. A hundred and fifty stories, if you could talk to them about it. Not everyone who sets out makes it eventually.

Multiple cuts to different locations demonstrate the squalid spaces they reside in. Self-reflexivity here hints at the film’s major aspiration – to pay homage to ‘those’ who set out to make it and to memorialise those who didn’t. The transition from Irina to the masses of migrants and refugees

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signifies the importance of solidarity networks among migrants, and particularly trafficked women who occupy a different temporality outside public space.37 This transition from a fictional narrative to documentary hybridises the film’s register. Images of white and African women on paintings made by Katzourakis are inserted without any particular order, thus addressing the film’s themes from different perspectives. Varying musical genres on the soundtrack dissolve into each other while superimpositions, like the bombs threatening the wildebeests, create layers of meaning and enrich the mode of address. Pluralism of formal means of expression, testimonies, faces, nationalities and identities is decisive in discussing the displacement of entire nations in an inclusive framework. Katzourakis insists38 on the term ‘hybrid’ rather than ‘impure’. Hybridity, a prominent and theoretically pertinent term in transnational film discourse and migration cinema, is a means to celebrate cultural difference which stands in contrast to hegemonic terms like diversity and multiculturalism. In terms of a formal mélange, hybridity underlines the fluidity of migrant identities and brings to the fore the act of border-crossing and the cross-pollination of cultures and genres across other borders. The mélange of migrant recollections is additionally a way of honouring those who made the journey and a challenge to tokenism. In this film, men and women, for the first time, are given a voice and paths taken from Africa, Kurdistan, Albania, Eastern Europe and Bangladesh are given currency and form. The various migrant stories accrued in the film further demonstrate the global span of migration, of homelessness and the varying push and pull factors, which also point to the uneven impact of globalisation, colonialism and neocolonialism in sending and host nations. As a Greek performer speaking in Greek who transitions between Katia to Irina, the film’s protagonist is a familiar subject and simultaneously a ‘stranger’. The absence of a Greek protagonist contributes to the image of Athens as a multicultural hub of displaced people. Irina is simultaneously Katia, a stage performer, a trafficked woman and an indigenous Greek, a suffering angel and an interlocutor through whom we encounter a multitude of strangers. She is at once ‘one of us’ and ‘one of them’. The hybridity of her on-screen and on-stage presence put alongside the film’s blurring of documentary techniques and strategies of representation, break down the dichotomy between indigenous and ‘Other’. At the same time, Irina’s search for Xenia brings audiences closer to the bigger picture, the displaced masses of people – an issue which implicitly involves everyone. The film’s last quarter deals more explicitly with Irina’s journey of hope as she reminisces over the initial impetus: a man approached her in

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Russia with the prospect of working in Greece for baby-sitting agencies. She rejoices and jumps with joy, shouting to her mother how she will send money from Greece, while carnival music in the soundtrack emphasises the irony of hope versus reality. A cut to the present sets in the unfortunate outcome of the journey. At the same time, her memories of sexual exploitation are reenacted while she describes the titillating details often associated with the kind of violence trafficked women endure in captivity. The film indeed relies to a good extent on the journey of hope turned traumatic and the hostility of the host society. The real Irina is represented in terms of her fantasy of hope and naivety, which helps to dramatise her bad fortune and that of other women and men who have trodden the way to the west. She is the archetype of the young and hopeful who in search for a better life find instead an ill fortune. Her painful memories of sexual assault in what she refers to as ‘no woman’s land’, accompanied by the sombre soundtrack, strengthen her victimhood, in contrast to earlier sequences where agency builds a network of support with other ‘strangers’. This is a common issue in anti-trafficking films, stressing tragic fate instead of active agency. The film ultimately turns towards the solitary figure of Irina and the ‘we’ employed in the voice-over becomes personal, leaving aside the collective mode of address. The film thus encourages compassion for her suffering, which she recounts in several sequences: ‘If you are difficult they beat you. “You be pretty and smiling if you want to live. Lift your hand so I can slip on the dress.” And there was Svetlana with the high heels, who couldn’t walk in the snow, like a lame bird’. Female screams in the background and superimpositions of wildebeests slipping off the rocks magnify the women’s tragic fate. Irina gesticulates, cries out, looks at the camera in bewilderment and raises her hands to the sky as a suffering angel pleading to God. Before committing suicide, her soliloquy leaves little beside a tragedy, one involving the journey of hope: ‘What to say about myself ? That I am ashamed of being a woman? That I don’t want to become a mother, nor that I can? That my skin melted from the horrible touching. That I have so much hatred inside me . . . I who loved the whole world? What could I say even if I were to speak?’ Suicide occurs as a natural reaction to this trauma, encouraging pity and compassion purely on the premise of suffering. With Irina’s suicide, representation collapses. And while this is meant to serve as a representation of several women who took their own life in captivity, the hidden elements of the migrant experience are underrepresented, asking the question of what is overrepresented. Suicide, tragic death and self-destruction feature prominently in Greek migration cinema either as an explosive rupture or as a sentimental reaction to the hostility

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of host nations. By focusing almost exclusively on the tragic outcomes of hopeful journeys, filmmakers annul the distance that would move audiences to genuine reflection.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Ticktin (2011), p. 259. Celik (2017), p. 81. Calhoun (2010), p. 33. Ticktin (2011), p. 4. Agamben (1998), p. 1. Arendt (1951). Angelopoulos confirms this sense of political urgency and indicates his own anger in an interview with Andrew Horton. ‘It is impossible,’ he mentions, ‘for us to understand why, at the end of the twentieth century, we are killing each other. Do professional politicians anywhere really care? [. . .] I want a new politics in the world with vision. And this will not be a simple matter of balancing an economy and the military. It must be a new form of communication between people’ ([1992] 2001, p. 83). Makrygiannakis (2014), p. 127. Ibid., p. 132. Everett (2004), p. 68. Makrygiannakis (2014), p. 126. Ibid., p. 128. Calotychos (2013), p. 163. Makrygiannakis (2014), p. 129. Ticktin (2011), p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 11–12. Aaron (2007), p. 117. Celik (2015), p. 20. Fainaru (2001), p. 79. Celik (2015), p. 14. Naficy (2001), p. 152. This refers to the Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam after the war in 1975. The term here is used in relation to the geographical allocation of refugees to the sea. Lykidis (2015), p. 351. Naficy (2001), p. 156. The ending credits tell that the migrant characters here are Kurds from a camp in Athens. Lykidis (2015), p. 350. One may recall here the colonel’s words: ‘They are waiting to be repatriated elsewhere and for them that “elsewhere” has acquired a strange meaning . . . mythical.’

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29. In this respect, filmmakers must adopt a feminist point of view in antitrafficking films in order to highlight the agency rather than victimhood of women. For more on the importance of perspective in anti-trafficking films see Ballesteros (2015), pp. 96–9. 30. Personal interview with Kyriakos Katzourakis, September 2018. 31. The traditional documentary film, according to Nichols, dates back to the early ethnographic films of Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) and the mandates of the Grierson school of thought which sought an observational mode of filmmaking and a ‘creative treatment of actuality’. See Nichols (2001), p. 145. 32. Nichols (2001), pp. 130–8. 33. Personal interview with Kyriakos Katzourakis. 34. Ibid. 35. Katzourakis (2004), p. 291. 36. Long and Moore (2012), p. 42. 37. Ballesteros (2015), p. 98. 38. Personal interview with Kyriakos Katzourakis, September 2018.

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C H AP TER 9

Documenting Crises: Raising Awareness through Documentary Film

This final chapter tackles recent efforts by Greek filmmakers to direct attention to the reception of refugees in Greece in the post-2010 period. Their films additionally address the country’s multifaceted crisis and the rise of Golden Dawn from marginal organisation to parliamentary member and threat to democracy. Two short documentaries exhibited online1 take place at the so-called ‘gateways to Europe’, the islands of Agathonisi and Lesbos situated on the eastern limits of the Aegean Sea. Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good (Tsakiris 2017) and 4.1 Miles (Matziaraki 2016) utilise the observational mode of documentary filmmaking. In these films, the directors look at life as it is lived, without intervening. Nichols writes that ‘the observational filmmaker adopts a peculiar mode of presence “on the scene” in which he or she appears to be invisible’, recording lived experience.2 Through their films, Kimon Tsakiris and Daphne Matziaraki turn viewers into spectators of events unfolding in real time. They provide a glimpse into the lived struggles of refugees and the efforts of rescuers at open sea. Their films also address the lack of proper infrastructure and the indifference of the European community toward the daily challenges that poorly equipped coastguards face and towards representatives of the tourist industry who feel threatened by the sudden influx of refugees. Both case studies thus address Greece’s devastating financial crisis and its impact on the reception and management of refugee populations – in Evthymios Papataxiarchis’s words, a ‘crisis within a crisis’.3 The filmmakers utilise plain evidence and real footage according to traditional modes of documentary filmmaking that adhere to John Grierson’s definition of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. In doing so, it is assumed that documentaries portray ‘factual representations of reality [. . .] that succeed in truthfulness through [their] implicit association with factuality’.4 The axiom underpinning this structure is the notion that ‘seeing is believing’, particularly since documentarians are thought of as witnesses. This, we will see, applies greatly to the first case studies in this chapter.

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Documentary has historically been the playing field of activists and investigative journalists who resort to visual media in order to provide testimony to social injustices and to transform public consciousness.5 Documentaries of this category own the potential to move audiences into collective action. This applies to Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair by Angeliki Kourounis (2016), a journalist who managed to infiltrate the organisation and follow them for months, documenting their public initiatives and meetings, and interviewing members. This comes at a momentous point: during the ongoing trial of Golden Dawn for the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, an anarchist and activist targeted by the party. Kourounis goes to great lengths to expose the party’s Nazi inclinations and its real and clandestine function as a paramilitary organisation fuelled by Nazi ideology. Her film builds a case for the justice system as it reveals the party’s ties to migrant attacks and the murder of Fyssas. She argues effectively in favour of social uproar against any form of totalitarian power and rhetoric, and in solidarity with migrants and activists. Summer and 4.1 Miles portray a certain ‘state of affairs’ that exists in the world of everyday lived experience.6 Regardless, however, of their aspiration to remain objective, these films articulate an argument, one that implicitly involves a humane (and humanitarian) response to refugees and a call for compassion towards displaced people. Yet caution must be exercised towards any claims of truth, particularly in the case of films that attempt to cover such a multifaceted phenomenon as ongoing migrant flows in crisis-ridden Greece. They provide only partial evidence and select images as ‘truth’ and thus risk producing a biased account of the state of affairs. In this respect, they additionally risk reinforcing biased accounts of news reports that legitimised the erroneous term ‘refugee crisis’, which spawned moral panic. On the contrary, we need to question any validity behind images that have become a permanent feature in mainstream media reports – drowning and victimised refugees, racist outbursts and the interventions of NGOs, volunteers and humanitarian organisations and the efforts of rescue crews to save stranded refugees. In any case, documentaries embed and construct discourse, an issue that inevitably affects any recourse to truth. It is therefore necessary that we distinguish between actuality and hegemonic discourse and eventually situate representations of lived experience and actuality within the historical world in which ‘objects collide, actions occur, [and] forces take their toll’.7 For example, refugees appear in 4.1 Miles in terms of bare life, floating in the Aegean Sea. The coastguards desperately try to bring them safely to land, where medical staff wait. If we examine sequences involving the rescuing of refugees as objective ‘truth’, we risk eliding numerous complex factors that shape the bigger picture

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either in terms of identity (refugees as more than bodies in need) or actuality (the macro-sociological level of events that turn citizens into refugees). Otherwise, victimhood and vulnerability are firmly linked to the temporality of refugees and we fail to question the dynamic between rescuers and rescued. Exactly because documentaries are assumed to provide objective eye-witness accounts, we need to maintain a critical mode of address. For these reasons, I adopt Nichols’s thesis that documentary images have their origin in ‘the historical world’ and that documentaries more than merely portray the historical world, they actually express an ‘argument’ about it.8 This understanding of documentary moves beyond Grierson’s commonsense definition and assumes that the historical world, beyond ‘actuality’, ‘lies outside and beneath all our representations of it’.9 What conventionally delineates a documentary according to Nichols is its relationship to the historical world. So while objectivity and truth are a given in observational documentaries, we need to maintain that they will very often feature only one version of the truth. The discussion here focuses on film as a means of raising awareness, shifting cultural perceptions and encouraging audiences to become actively engaged. Films are evaluated on their capacity to screen the socalled ‘refugee crisis’ beyond the politically biased accounts of the media which both ‘seduce and disempower spectators’.10 To what extent can the proposed films empower spectators? To answer this question, I interrogate these films additionally on their capacity to evoke the tensions and forces that exist outside the films’ frames of reference. It is argued that in documenting the quotidian struggles of refugees, the observational mode serves to capture the events as they unfold in a temporality of crisis. Tsakiris and Matziaraki fail to question this ideologically loaded term and to distinguish between a predicament of the Greek nation and of refugees, positing the sudden arrival of displaced people as a problem that the already devastated Greek state cannot manage. Their documentaries tell us more about Greece and the anxieties of Greeks due to the financial crisis than about refugees per se. They encourage audiences to ponder the failures of the Greek and European establishment in managing the ‘refugee crisis’ while maintaining a compassionate attitude towards refugees. They deal with issues that have routinely featured in the news headlines, which in turn have treated the situation on the sparsely populated islands as a news headline. Ultimately, it is worth asking whether documentary realism can adequately tell the stories of refugees and whether fiction films could evoke a wider range of references. The same issues pertaining to documentary filmmaking, as discussed in Chapter Three in relation to Roadblocks, thus persist. Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair on the other

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hand figures as a hybrid form that pertains more to activist filmmaking and investigative journalism. By targeting Golden Dawn, Kourounis exposes brutal attacks against migrants, which have been perceptibly instigated by the party and remain unmentioned by mainstream media and the political establishment. Her film involves migrants and refugees beyond the vicissitudes of the crisis, looking more at what happens to those who make it into Greece and even those who become fully integrated.

What it Means to Be There: Filming Refugees at the Frontline11 In a 2016 report from Lesbos, Papataxiarchis provides a comprehensive account of the unfolding refugee crisis. Aware of the ethical implications of his presence as an anthropologist, Papataxiarchis outlines the various interest groups reporting directly from the informal gate of Europe. The presence of Greek and international journalists, NGOs, volunteers, social scientists, activists, medical personnel and government agents determines the reception of refugees and dissemination of information on a national and international scale. These groups are empowered to speak on the ‘state of affairs’ and on behalf of refugees. Filmmakers are major interest groups who try to make sense of the seemingly chaotic situation. In their efforts, they produce a certain discourse surrounding the ‘state of affairs’ as a political or humanitarian ‘crisis’. Rather than looking at the numerous ethical issues surrounding the very action of filming refugees, I am interested in comprehending what it implies to report stories and images of ‘crisis’ and strive for a truthful observation of refugees’ struggles directly from the frontline. For Papataxiarchis, ‘[B]eing there, on the front line, differentiates everybody [. . .] according to the length of stay and the type of duties they perform.’12 This urges us to raise the question – what exactly is the duty of documentarians and how are they distinguished from other interest groups? In the case of Tsakiris and Matziaraki, duty is not linked to refugees per se, particularly since they are addressing Greek and international viewers. By documenting events as they occur without intervening, the filmmakers provide an alternative to audiences misled by sensational media reports, which too often tend to demonise refugees or construct them in overly sentimental terms. In other words, journalists and filmmakers portray similar images and events but in highly different terms. Film especially is a privileged medium of representation which can ‘tell the “real” story of movements, inequalities, cultural hierarchies and exclusion in contemporary Europe’.13 This of course does not exclude

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the possibility of overlapping aesthetics and rhetoric. The documentaries of Matziaraki and Tsakiris shape the minds of spectators, encouraging a sympathetic disposition towards the newcomers. Sympathy for refugees is framed in terms of a humanitarian discourse prioritising suffering and the immediate needs of refugees. Documentarians are not thus agents of radical change but their films could be conceptualised as a ‘cinema of duty’ which aims at ‘correcting the misrepresentations of the mainstream’.14 Being there entails immediacy and an immersive experience for viewers, who are transported to the frontline. It is also an attempt to make sense of a loaded discourse that inevitably impacts refugees and not only the minds of spectators. This discourse is implicitly linked to the geographical locations where the films take place. It transforms the islands from popular tourist destinations, seemingly untouched by globalisation, into an ideologically loaded stage where the ‘refugee crisis’ begins and is rehashed by journalists, corporate media and filmmakers. By remaining on the frontlines, however, the filmmakers provide a very limiting glimpse into the stories of refugees, leaving it to audiences to become actively informed and involved through other sources. At the frontline, documentarians capture dramatic, tragic and heroic moments from the lives of refugees and those involved in rescuing and aiding them. Although these migrant narratives are inadequate and very often not about migrants per se, they do capture viewers’ attention thanks to their suspenseful and eventful nature. The question is where the filmmakers steer viewers once this is achieved. Tsakiris and Matziaraki document sequences from the lives of refugees that are replete with drama and tragedy, which in the hands of previous filmmakers discussed in this book has helped valorise migrants as either noble or tragic heroes. Documentary realism affords similar opportunities. In 4.1 Miles, the protagonists are not the shipwrecked refugees. Instead, as the film’s title implies, one major point of reference is the four-mile stretch between Turkey and Lesbos which refugees routinely crossed in 2015. The film is staged principally at this neutral seascape, where refugees are reduced to bare life and the sea transforms into both a transit zone and a dumping ground of refugees. The year 2015 marked a highpoint in the escalation of the refugee crisis as numbers soared, marking a saturation point for the Greek islands nearest Turkey. In 2015 alone, Lesbos witnessed the arrivals of 512,000 refugees, compared to 12,000 in 2014.15 Amidst Greece’s escalating financial crisis and a referendum by the newly elected Syriza government, the sudden arrival of thousands of refugees was perceived as an unmanageable crisis within a crisis, threatening the economy and tranquillity of the island. The unmanageability

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of this sudden influx features prominently in 4.1 Miles as the menial coastguard forces are unable to save everyone scattered across the Eastern Mediterranean Route, an issue that fills Captain Kyriakos Papadopoulos, the film’s main protagonist, with immense emotional stress as he weeps at the thought of casualties. Indeed, many of those who set off don’t make it.16 The liquid border separating Greece and Turkey is imagined thus as a graveyard and one of the focal points of a humanitarian catastrophe. In 4.1 Miles the Eastern Aegean is also the setting of a tense and thrilling narrative which the director conveys by literally being there, on the boat of Captain Papadopoulos. The film opens in medias res, during a tense rescue operation. Matziaraki is situated in the corner of the deck with her handheld camera as Papadopoulos and crew struggle to bring men, women and children on board from their sinking dinghies. Crew members shout in all directions while the screams of women heighten the searing dread. Captain Papadopoulos urges the director to put down the camera and help the children, pointing to the ethical and moral issues at stake. The scene is steeped in a language of emergency, with its erratic camera movement, jagged angles, shaking frame and fractured montage beside the frantic screams of the captain and refugees. At the same time that Matziaraki is not given the space to reflect on her presence during the operation, as she has to let go of her camera to get involved, audiences are plunged into the ‘state of affairs’, arguably disabled from reflecting on the dynamic between victims and rescuers and the line of events that led to this moment. The emphasis here is on adrenaline and immediacy, the rescuers and their mission. The mission is successful. As they make their way back to the port, the captain describes in the voice-over that ‘life used to be calm’, highlighting how globalisation and migrant flows inevitably impact even the remotest Aegean islands and their unprepared inhabitants, who are plunged headfirst into a crisis. The ship is tied in front of another, named ‘Sea Breeze Boat Trips’, obviously used for tourist trips. The contrast between each boat’s function brings to our attention the difference between migrant flows and tourism – those circulated by capital and those who circulate capital, to paraphrase Žižek.17 The next day, the captain and crew enjoy a moment of calm at a local café by the port. Yet very soon, audiences are plunged again into another tense expedition. The boat sets off under unfavourable weather conditions. The sea is rough and the boat has a rather small capacity, which makes it prone to capsizing. The boat arrives at a spot where a sinking dinghy full of people floats. The men struggle to bring them all on board with few ropes. The women and children have priority. Children are rushed to the corner of the deck where Matziaraki is situated, her camera capturing every instance of

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panic as children are literally pushed to the rear. The screams of terror and panic amplify the sense of dread and generate an audible layer of suspense. Crying and visibly terrified children are thrown into the embrace of parents and other grown-ups. A close-up on a freezing boy shaking from the cold magnifies the scene’s overwhelming sense of dread and further generates compassion for the utter suffering of the innocent. A mother and her two sons, however, are still missing. One woman screams ‘God help us’ as the ship proceeds towards a woman with two kids getting carried away by the waves. The boat is rocking intensely and seems ready to capsize. They rescue the woman and children but her boys are unconscious and they need immediate medical assistance. The captain steers the ship back to the port. A close-up on his focused and concerned expression juxtaposed with a close-up on an icon of St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, parallels Captain Papadopoulos with a patron saint of shipwrecked refugees. At the frontline of the crisis, Matziaraki paints the image of a genuine hero, an exemplary captain and saviour of refugees. He is shown at various instances standing at the helm of the ship or on the edge of the deck by the waving Greek flag, his stern expression conveying the urgency and seriousness of his mission – all in all a powerful and inspiring portrait of a hero. At the port, no ambulance is to be seen yet and the captain becomes increasingly angry. Local patrons of a restaurant and volunteers carry blankets and the crew resuscitates the unconscious children. Onlookers watch in fear as the captain struggles to resuscitate a baby while one crew member breaks down in tears. The baby is alive and as the ambulance finally arrives, the scene clears.

Figure 9.1 A close-up on a crying boy amplifies the drama and tragedy of the scene in 4.1 Miles (Matziaraki 2016).

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At the frontline, the director captures heart-wrenching moments from a humanitarian catastrophe, one involving essential forms of bare life which appeal to the humanity and consciousness of audiences: women, children and unconscious babies in need of life-saving aid. The film’s three rescue sequences are the main events and essential to the director’s plea for a return to a lost form of humanity, embodied by Captain Papadopoulos. His only concern is to save everyone, not leaving anyone behind. This is essential to his function as a captain of the local coastguard, one that he practises instinctively. Indeed, during the film’s second half, he describes in the voice-over the instinctive nature of his function as captain and Good Samaritan: ‘I’m scared. I can’t reassure them. It’s impossible. When I look into their eyes, I see their memories of war.’ This instinctive function is shared by three elderly women in Lesbos, who are immortalised in a photograph capturing a moment of solidarity with a refugee: the famous photograph shows a tired Syrian mother who has entrusted her baby to the three old women, who nurse and tend to the baby with expressions of love and care. Caring for children, regardless of nationality and ethnicity, is a basic characteristic of their gender and class. They have been raising and nurturing local children for at least three generations. This genuine display of humanity18 by inhabitants of the island led them to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. This sheer sense of humanity, seemingly lost at a time when Greece and Europe have been increasingly implementing a fortress mentality,19 is in all likelihood what audiences will take from Matziaraki’s film. At the same time that the film demonstrates the nobility and courage of Captain Papadopoulos, it creates a hierarchical relationship that goes unquestioned. Indeed, audiences follow the hero’s trajectory, identify with and cheer his heroic efforts, hoping that he will complete his mission successfully. Once this is achieved, relief sets in as the hero has completed his mission. These generic elements of adventure films points to something problematic in documentary and media narratives of rescue operations at the frontline of the refugee crisis. The terror at open sea brings to our attention the suffering of refugees and the near-death experience of the journey to Europe. The film’s vivid rescue operations highlight with clarity and transparency the state of emergency. Yet, the hegemonic roles of saviour and drowning victim and the audiences’ presumed identification with the hero make these scenes thrilling to watch as we sit in our safe spaces and cheer for the saviour while audiences experience the fantasy of saving defenceless ‘Others’ without the peril of the journey. Our attention is thus on the benefactors and their immediate experience. The victims, the injustices they endure and the historical and political dimensions of their plight are outside the event’s sphere. The shipwrecked refugees are thus

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Figure 9.2 A close-up of Captain Papadopoulos in 4.1 Miles. At the back we can discern an icon of St Nicholas (Matziaraki 2016).

distant ‘Others’ whose suffering happens in an undefined and ahistorical temporality, a seascape which could be anywhere since the event (the rescue operation or the ‘being there’ of refugees?) is not inserted into a broader timeline in which other events and initiatives can be examined. For Chouliaraki the presence and the interventions of the benefactor are ‘instrumental in summoning up the emotional regime of empathy, tender-heartedness and gratitude in positive image appeals’.20 Spectators are not led to identify with the vulnerability of distant ‘Others’. In this case, a key motivation for solidarity and sympathy is the emotional vulnerability of the benefactor. What potentially unsettles this dynamic is the fact that he does not manage to save everyone, while many of those rescued die from exposure to the elements. The ill-equipped coastguards indeed cannot manage their daunting task. The captain mentions at the beginning that 200 shipwreck refugees every day correspond to only ten coastguards. Towards the end, while crew and volunteers tend to tens of freezing children, one man exclaims ‘the world needs to see what is happening here’. This tense moment reinforces the sense of a chaotic and unmanageable crisis for the island and its inhabitants. The film 4.1 Miles pleads for our attention and action beyond the complacency of our status as viewers in a painless action narrative. It asks viewers to ‘tell the world’ about Lesbos. It draws attention to the island and the coastguard’s efforts and raises awareness on the heroic efforts of Papadopoulos and the crew. We have seen this materialise with the influx of international volunteers,

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NGOs and Hollywood celebrities who have used their status to bring attention to the ongoing humanitarian disaster, transforming the island into the locus of a wide-ranging and semantically rich discourse. The film demands international attention as well and arguably has achieved this as it received a nomination for an Academy Award. In an interview,21 Captain Papadopoulos ascribes the film’s Oscar nomination to its documentary realism – ‘because it is so real’. Unbeknownst to himself, the captain has raised a major issue at stake in documentary realism – how in other words do we render visible the suffering of refugees in order to gain the attention of international artistic and humanitarian institutions and spur the world into action? The film’s particular focus obscures the extent of systemic violence and leaves little room for reflection. Although the phenomenon of smuggling is mentioned during a brief conversation in the film, audiences need to look elsewhere in order to comprehend its economic, geopolitical and humanitarian implications. Furthermore, the film provides a very narrow margin of information on the trajectories of rescued refugees, in other words, what happens after they are rescued and does merely rescuing refugees, necessary as it is, improve their lives and how can this be achieved? How have hundreds of thousands arrived at the sea between Lesbos and Turkey? Indeed, in 2012 the Greek government built a ten-kilometre-long razorwire metal fence by the region of Evros that blocked the porous border. The region served initially as one of the main entry points on the ‘Balkan route’ together with the border region of Idomeni, where the Macedonian authorities have also built a barrier. It is no surprise then that smugglers have found other, more dangerous routes. The latter is briefly discussed during a conversation at lunchtime, where we discover that prospective refugees are blackmailed, leaving it eventually to family and relatives to pay the large fees. After the final rescue mission, the captain’s second-incommand addresses the camera: ‘the smugglers, they are criminals’. These moments underscore a preexisting dread as the smugglers remain unseen and the injustices they inflict on displaced people are merely hinted at. While this forces viewers to use their imagination and put together the pieces of the puzzle, the film reinforces the invisibility of smugglers and their channels. Ultimately, the sufferers in 4.1 Miles can be observed and pitied, but their temporality lies ‘outside the flow of history, outside the geography of power relationships and its political necessities’.22 Contrary to the kindness and self-sacrifice displayed by the inhabitants of Lesbos, the few local inhabitants of Agathonisi (literally ‘benevolent island’) in Summer on the Island of Good are anything but good. This ironic impression dominates in Tsakiris’s film, which captures the dead-end situations

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refugees find themselves in at Fortress Europe. Instead of kindness, local residents, police, coastguards and even tourists display indifference and hostility to the newcomers, who expect to make their way to the mainland and continue their journey since Greece is merely a transit region for them. At the frontline, mobility is hindered, walls are raised and refugees are trapped at their gateway to Europe. Summer thus documents what happens after the rescue operation. At the frontline, Summer and 4.1 Miles capture an escalating crisis, pregnant with eruption. The latter conveys the humanity of Greeks but Tsakiris goes to great lengths to expose the inhumanity that makes up Fortress Europe.23 However, Summer does not avoid the pitfalls of 4.1 Miles as it focuses primarily on the refugees’ bewilderment and panic rather than the historicity of the(ir) crisis. Additionally, the film functions on a binary logic which magnifies the dystopia of a catch-22: indeed, the director pits refugees against reluctant restaurant owners and violent policemen who treat them like cattle at a slaughterhouse. Set during the high season, refugees also encounter xenophobia from tourists who are frightened of disease24 and prefer to enjoy their holidays than ‘do the right thing’, which would normally include helping stranded refugees onto their yachts and defying the authorities, as one visitor remarks. Here, the riches and hedonism of a legal visitor are juxtaposed with the illegality and trauma of refugees. The former is welcome while the latter are a threat. At every turn, the island’s newcomers are met with an impenetrable fortress which Tsakiris exposes from the frontline of a crisis that had just begun. Nonetheless, Tsakiris and Matziaraki achieve more than merely capturing lived experience; they articulate a call to rediscover a lost humanity and to break the invisible walls that separate people, but facilitate the free circulation of capital. They tell us more about Greek anxieties and the management of the crisis; this implies either helping refugees or blocking them. Summer pits refugees against the ugly face of intolerance and reproduces, to a good extent, the moralism and sensational imagery of the media. The invisible wall is after all tangible only as far as refugees are victimised and marginalised. In 2009, refugees from Africa arrived at Agathonisi. According to a 2011 census, the island’s population is below 200 permanent inhabitants. It is just over thirteen square kilometres and has only recently begun investing in tourism. Obviously it has a small capacity and is not the appropriate location for large-scale housing operations, including ‘welcome centres’ like Moria. This is what attracted Tsakiris to the island in the first place: ‘How would the varying tensions of globalisation materialise on a small and sparsely populated island that has suddenly become the main gateway to Europe?’25 Tsakiris resorts to the observational mode to document the ‘state of affairs’ from every possible angle – newly

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arrived refugees, restaurant owners and tourists, the coastguard, older inhabitants and police forces. Gone are the agents of positive images. The inhabitants’ reaction to this unforeseen turn of events creates layers of crisis that manifest the unprecedented transformation of the European south from sender to host of migrants. The film opens on the port of Agathonisi where tourists disembark. On the left, separated from the crowd and distinguished by their skin colour, are a large group of African refugees. Already from the opening scene, the hostility typically assigned to Fortress Europe is on display. The tourists, some obese and carrying several pieces of luggage, walk past the refugees dressed in rags without any belongings. The image, although schematic and didactic, visualises the landscape of fear and hostility and the sheer disparity of wealth between both categories of visitors. Once the tourists returning to Athens have embarked, the refugees rush in separately. On the speaker, the disembodied voice of the captain remarks ‘make sure you keep them in the back. I don’t want them wandering around’. Fear of disease and the image of the ‘Other’ as pollutant are uttered in various instances by Greek inhabitants. It is evident as well in their behaviour and the organisation of space since the ‘illegal immigrants’, as they are constantly referred to, are separated from other inhabitants. Tsakiris interviews everyone involved. A local restaurateur who cooks every day for the refugees appears entirely hopeless and frustrated, claiming that ‘We are on the verge of racism. Not that we

Figure 9.3 The gross inequalities between tourists and refugees displayed in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good (Tsakiris 2017).

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are racists. The people here are very welcoming but we just can’t take it anymore. The island doesn’t have the infrastructure. We still help them but we don’t want them here.’ He ascribes this to the indifference of the Greek government and EU and foresees a conspiracy involving the Islamicisation of Greek society, spearheaded by Turkey, the country’s arch enemy. The restaurateur holds onto the patriarchal mandates of Orthodox Christianity and simultaneously projects the lasting myth of Greek hospitality, which in this case is governed by bigotry and ignorance. Greeks imagine themselves as victims of powerful elites who have inflicted a crisis on their country, yet it is clear that, on a scale of victimhood, refugees rank higher than Greeks, powerless and helpless yet branded ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘pollutants’. And yet Greeks like this restaurateur are hospitable and beyond any criticism. This paradox has governed public discourse and drives the populist rhetoric of Golden Dawn, which deems Greeks strangers in ‘their own’ country, threatened by powerful elites and refugees simultaneously. Exemplifying further the paradoxicality of this dynamic, refugees are seen as a threat and wretched people, both a menace and a site for humanitarian care. Terrifying and yet puny. Intolerance becomes sensational in the next sequence. Black and brown refugees gather under the scorching sun to receive some of their daily goods. One man distributing the goods feels threatened by the approaching mass and shouts in Greek, ‘Get in line otherwise you won’t eat. Sit down.’ He points to one African refugee: ‘I will send you back to Turkey.’ The crowd, visibly bewildered and eager, approaches. The man screams ‘Get in line or I will smash your heads.’ One refugee comes closer and gets slapped and screamed at. This is the ugly face of intolerance captured at the frontline. The scene’s tension verges on an imminent eruption thanks to the Manichaean juxtaposition of perpetrator and victim and an explosive display of racism with numbing effect. Yet it is real and palpable in the gestures and rhetoric of local inhabitants. The scene brings to the fore the inherent animosity that stems from racism and xenophobia. Audiences though will have to look beyond the perpetrator in order to grasp the true extent and institutional foundations of racism and violence. Indeed, shock effect directs our outrage towards the perpetrator and not the sufferer, thus disempowering spectators from assuming genuine action and displaying empathy. The historicity of this ‘state of affairs’ gains salience as Tsakiris proceeds to document a wider array of events and facts: the clandestine work of smugglers in Turkey, air-space violations by Turkish F-16s flying over Agathonisi and contributing to the hostile climate between Greece and Turkey, the

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Figure 9.4 A local man slaps an African refugee and threatens to deport him in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good (Tsakiris 2017).

newcomers’ plans to reach Europe, the pleasures of mobility as exemplified by wealthy tourists and the financial crisis of Greece that had erupted several years before. Wealthy tourists like a German man sunbathing and drinking beer on his yacht appear as the solution to the financial crisis, while the refugees are an unmanageable threat. In a brief interview, it becomes obvious that the German boat owner would not bring stranded refugees aboard his yacht so as to not face any legal complications. Indifference and hostility feed into the response of everyone involved. Amidst this growing crisis, the dejection of the locals, who feel abandoned by the state and the EU, features prominently. It exemplifies the kind of populist rhetoric the extreme right routinely exploits – of Greeks against powerful elites. The sudden influx of migrants is one major manifestation of this new world order. Feeling like a minority on their own island, local residents in several sequences project the popular anti-establishment argument which maintains that the state has abandoned its own people and left them exposed to the dangers of irregular migration. This problematic reasoning has come to justify the intolerance of ordinary Greeks. Such intolerance was flared by Golden Dawn members, who have employed grassroots methods to approach and gain the votes of workingclass Greeks, who felt abandoned by the state amidst the ‘ghettoisation’ of their neighbourhoods. Disdain toward external forces and prejudice, which seem to thrive at Agathonisi, provide further insight into the widely held self-perception of Greece as a pariah state.

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In this theatre of the absurd, the bewilderment of refugees inserts layers of affect and crisis. One man articulates his bare humanity while holding his five-month-old baby: ‘There is no doctor on the island. We are asking from your government for some help . . . as a human.’ Another man expresses anger toward the hostile treatment by the police which makes no sense to him, just as it makes no sense to a Palestinian refugee to have to pay fifteen euros for a ticket to Athens. The universal right to mobility is not a given in Fortress Europe, particularly for poor refugees. This, in many ways, is a familiar narrative of entrapment. We have seen how the journey is brought to an unexpected halt in Roadblocks, how mobility and agency become static and tragic in Hostage and stasis a modus vivendi in The Suspended Step of the Stork. Here, mobility is unexpectedly suspended leading to a tragicomic catch-22 situation. The refugees are unwanted but they don’t wish to stay at Agathonisi or even Greece and yet they are held by unseen forces against their will. Globalisation is thus confining rather than liberating. For Bauman, the free movement of the powerful (and their assets) can be achieved only by limiting – through increased border controls – the mobility of others (and ‘Others’).26 Ursula Biemann points out how this has been achieved through the Schengen Agreement, which guaranteed the abolition of internal borders within continental Europe in order to create a single external border implemented by immigration checks. Border control was outsourced to sending countries, mainly in Africa, where mobility was unhindered for decades. ‘The freedom to move within Europe is, therefore, achieved at the cost of free movement within Africa,’ Biemann concludes.27 In 2016, the EU signed an agreement with Turkey to restrict migrant flows in exchange for membership concessions. At the receiving end of this agreement, Greece was ill-prepared to manage thousands of returnees, many of whom became trapped. The deal was successful in reducing migrant flows but a great failure in securing the rights of previous arrivals and of all those left behind in detention centres. In order to handle illegal entries and push-backs to Turkey, the European Border and Coastguard Agency Frontex was employed. Frontex has been entrusted by the European Union with guarding the north-eastern Mediterranean against irregular migration. The actions of Frontex have done little, however, to bolster the efforts of coastguard officers like Kyriakos Papadopoulos since it operates solely on the premise of returning migrants, not saving them. A 2014 report by the International Federation for Human Rights concludes that by placing the priority on sealing borders and forcing push-backs, often through violent means, Frontex violates the rights of asylum seekers since no one can be sent back before thorough examination of their individual situation.28 In 2013, the European Commission proposed a series

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of amendments to the Dublin regulation which requires asylum seekers to be deported to the southern European countries where they were first fingerprinted and where their application will be processed. Countries like Italy and Greece are not, however, the first choice of migrants, who thus become indefinitely trapped in this transit zone. These countries additionally have failed to keep in place humanitarian laws and welfare provisions. Dublin, Schengen and the installation of Frontex formulate a regime of strict border controls which make Europe an impenetrable fortress for irregular migrants but a borderless region for Europeans, paradoxically creating more opportunities for smugglers. Indeed, with the blocking of previous routes, migrants were inevitably steered toward the deadlier Libya–Italy sea route. At stake are human agency and the right to free movement for all. In Summer on the Island of Good the refugees finally reach the port of Piraeus in Athens and Tsakiris is there to document this significant step in their trajectory as they have escaped from the ‘island of good’, reunited with family and resumed mobility. The journey of course is not over and still filled with uncertainty. To understand what happens from here on, the spectator will have to look for information elsewhere and assume that the trials and tribulations of refugees are far from over.

Documenting the Rise of the Extreme Right in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair The national elections of 2012 saw the extreme right party Golden Dawn (GD) gain third place with over 400,000 votes and eighteen seats in the parliament. Although in-depth research on the meteoric rise of GD clearly demonstrates that this turn of events is not surprising, considering the country’s financial crisis, the links of GD to the political elite and unresolved issues stemming from the civil war,29 the placement of GD in the parliament remains a shock. The party’s rise did not come out of a political and ideological vacuum, as the extreme right has been steadily gaining traction in Europe, for reasons that pertain to the widespread failures of mainstream politics and the inability of governments to carry out the social contract.30 Indeed, GD has gained momentum and growing support since (and thanks to) the emergence of the financial crisis and, through grassroots initiatives, a foothold in the minds of people. The historicity of growing extreme right support in Greece is a separate area of research. It should be mentioned, however, that GD was the first responder to the debt crisis in 2009. The party’s members took to the streets, mainly in impoverished working-class neighbourhoods of the Athenian city centre

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that simultaneously attracted irregular migrants living in squalid conditions. In residential areas like the downgraded Aghios Panteleimon, which turned into one of its strongholds, GD became a primary outlet that channelled public anger and directed it, first and foremost, towards migrants. Party members managed this through public distribution of food, blood donations ‘only for Greeks’ (ID cards being the only prerequisite), protection towards scared citizens31 who saw tenement buildings occupied by irregular migrants and by being generally in the neighbourhoods of ordinary people who felt abandoned by the government.32 At the same time, the left failed to respond to the immense frustration of people, who then became easy prey to the populism of GD and its simplistic solutions to the crisis, favouring, above all, the nation over scapegoat migrants and minorities. The latter is the departure point for Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair, a polemic testimony on the threat GD poses to democracy. As a journalist and activist, the director’s main goal is to expose the truth behind the façade of the popular nationalist party and lay out its crimes against dissidents and migrants. From the very opening, Angeliki Kourounis assumes a participant interactive position rather than an observational position as she addresses her audience and details her personal reasoning: her partner is Jewish, one of her sons a homosexual and the other an anarchist. Kourounis is herself a feminist activist and the daughter of émigrés. The participatory mode arms the film with directness and a vocabulary that applies to activism and investigative journalism. Kourounis’s direct mode of address and polemic opposition leave little room for apathy among audiences. Thus, alongside the mode of filmmaking and representation, this section reflects on the film’s content and potential to inform and empower audiences. Kourounis is keen on empowering audiences as she documents every event ‘just like a conflict, a civil war except in name’ adding that ‘witnessing becomes an obsession’. She furthers indicates the complaisance of the mass media in bringing GD to power and the opportunities that visual media afford to militant journalists and activists. As an investigative journalist, Kourounis is indeed obsessed with denouncing and exposing the group for its true nature: not merely a nationalist party of ‘patriots’, but a neo-Nazi militia and criminal organisation. She infiltrates the group as an ally interested in making a film that portrays the group and its members in a favourable light. In reality she deconstructs the image of the popular party and forces audiences to contemplate the party’s obvious links to Nazism. Since the start of the debt crisis, GD began directing its rhetoric and violent attacks away from leftists and anarchists (who served as the

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Figure 9.5 Golden Dawn members and followers make public displays of power like a Nazi militia in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair (Kourounis 2016).

group’s primary target after its formation in 1983)33 towards migrants and asylum seekers, especially those of Muslim origin.34 In Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair, migrants are the victims of attacks, helpless and voiceless. In one sequence, Din Mohammad, a Pakistani man, addresses the camera and demonstrates his near-fatal wounds, recounting how he was attacked. He revisits the crime scene with Kourounis, the central square of Aghios Panteleimon, despite feeling afraid. On the tiles of the square, a hateful message has been sprayed: ‘Strangers out of Greece, Greece for Greeks.’ Kourounis exposes the complacency of the people and state (‘the cradle of democracy was comfortable with it’) and aptly indicates that she too was scared to paint over it. Yet, as Kourounis remarks, she can cross the square every day without fear because she is white. Din Mohammad though cannot since the public squares have turned into bastions of the extreme right, where ordinary people wearing GD T-shirts attack migrants with absolute impunity and with the complaisance of the police.35 In her lengthy discussions with GD member Haris Mexas, Kourounis does not have to strive to extract Mexas’s blatant racism and bigotry. He declares with pride that GD is not a racist but a nationalist party. He ardently supports the party line on immigration, which allegedly focuses exclusively on illegal immigration. Mexas is not preoccupied with ‘Poles and Bulgarians’ who ‘came legally’, ‘with papers’. The problem is ‘all these thousands of illegals who come from Pakistan, Muslims who try to impose their religion on me’. He further argues that ‘Greeks were a white race’

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and that Pakistanis ‘distort’ his colour. Like Tsakiris, Kourounis lingers on the horrible face of intolerance and the sensational language of men like Mexas or the Agathonisi-based restaurateur. Here, intolerance takes on its superlative form: a neo-Nazi supporter of eugenics. Mexas will go so far as to boast about his history book collection, including an original copy of Mein Kampf purchased at an auction in London. This, however, does not make him a racist as he stubbornly insists, bringing to mind benchmark phrases like ‘I am not a racist, but . . . ’ or ‘Us racists? Are you kidding?’ When asked though about the existence of raid guilds and attacks against migrants and anarchists, Mexas sticks to another party line: ‘GD does not commit crimes’. Any crimes involving migrants are exclusively ‘from foreigners to foreigners’. The dearth of research on the existence of raid guilds within the party’s ranks, formed in the tradition of the Nazi party’s original paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung, speaks of a different response and gives further validation to Kourounis’s polemic account. According to Kourounis, ‘evidence of assaults has multiplied since 2009’ and their links to GD are indisputable. An interview with Yonus Mohammadi, former president of the Afghan community in Athens, sheds light on the daily attacks against migrants in central Athens in the period leading to the 2012 victory of GD. He recounts to Kourounis the time a dozen men wearing black T-shirts (‘the lads in black’ as party leader Nikos Michaloliakos calls them) stormed his office armed with clubs and chains. ‘I told them I teach your language. I know

Figure 9.6 Haris Mexas proudly shows off his prized copy of Mein Kampf in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair (Kourounis 2016).

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Greek culture, I am a doctor.’ Nevertheless, Yonus received a beating and since then avoids the square of Aghios Panteleimon. He points on a map to the neighbourhoods where migrants are not welcome, designating the new racial cartography of Athens, which has transformed poor and neglected neighbourhoods into extreme right strongholds. The most recent attack according to Yonus was in the downgraded zone of Metaxourgeio where an Iranian migrant had his ear cut off. Such attacks became a daily affair in the city centre, particularly after the assault and rape of a Greek woman by a Pakistani migrant and the murder of a Greek man. These events were overrepresented by mainstream media but were a casus belli for GD and validated the mass pogroms of 2011 and 2012, during which gangs clad in black repeatedly and indiscriminately attacked migrants and asylum seekers in broad daylight, chased them through the streets and dragged them off buses. Many of them were severely beaten and stabbed.36 To date, over 300 migrants and asylum seekers have been attacked.37 Attacks have been carried out most often by random people and groups loosely affiliated to GD. Nevertheless, any time a link is made, major party members publicly deny ever knowing the perpetrators, who allegedly acted alone. Instead, they talk of their pariah status and accuse the media and political elite of unjustly persecuting them, an issue that additionally serves to paint Golden Dawners as martyrs. In September 2012 however, party MPs Yorgos Germenis, Elias Panagiotaros and Constantinos Barbarousis instigated their own version of vigilante justice without obstruction. They led a group of other members in rural Athens and attacked dark-skinned merchants at an open-air market. After verifying they had no permits to sell their goods, they destroyed the merchants’ stalls with their Greek flag poles. Afterwards, Germenis stated to the gathered correspondents, ‘We reported to the police that some illegal immigrants were selling their goods without papers, and did what Golden Dawn had to do.’ The violent behaviour and general aggressiveness of the party’s members and supporters distinguishes GD from any other far right party and formation which has surfaced in Greece since the restoration of democracy in 1974.38 Through Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair, Kourounis denounces the complicity of the police in these crimes. During their discussion, Yonus details the hopeless situation that migrants are faced with once they settle in Greece. After being attacked in his office, he tried filing a complaint but was met with hostility by two police officers who threatened to lock him up for three days in a holding cell. ‘I thought: imagine this is happening to me and I know the language, I have papers, I can understand certain things. But what happens to those who are newcomers, who don’t speak the language, who don’t have a voice?’ From

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here on, Kourounis thus proceeds to give a voice to Din Mohammad, who is indeed helpless when faced with the complicity of the police. He recounts how his assailants poured beer on him while he lay in front of a tenement building unconscious and abandoned. A resident who saw him lying on the floor told him to leave and called the police.39 He was kept at the station for two hours and received a beating by the officers, who also confiscated his mobile phone and asylum request certificate. Mohammad’s vivid description of the policemen’s behaviour brings to mind Elion Senja’s torturers in Hostage, who urinate on his residence permit. Din was released at night and told to stop drinking despite insisting that his assailants poured beer on him. ‘Now I’m afraid to go out, I’m afraid it will happen again’ he concludes. Similar cases of police brutality and complicity with GD have been mounting and yet are met with general reluctance by the state and justice system. Research speaks volumes on the complaisance of police forces and the existence of GD supporters within police ranks.40 Thanks to the work of journalist and activist Dimitris Psarras, who is covering the ongoing trial and has written extensively about the party, we are aware of attacks conducted against political dissidents from the late 1990s, when the group was still considered a minority. Psarras has also testified in the trial for the murder of Pavlos Fyssas and openly denounced GD as a Nazi militia. A major shift occurred with the murder of Fyssas in 2013 by Yorgos Roupakias, a GD ‘soldier’. The conservative right-wing government of New Democracy responded swiftly and the leading members of the organisation were apprehended and charged. Kourounis attributes the sudden shift to the victim’s identity – ‘one of our own’. After all, New Democracy, the centre-right party of Kyriakos Mitsotakis and governing party since 2019, had profited by utilising the xenophobic populist rhetoric in its own pre-election campaign. Immigration is a major topic in party campaigns and has heavy influence over the final vote. In 2012, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, as Kourounis aptly demonstrates after her discussion with Yonus and Din, widely used an anti-immigrant rhetoric that targeted popular moral panics like illegal immigration and the large presence of immigrant children in Greek preschools. A shot of a city wall sprayed with a popular mantra provides a better understanding of the complicity of the entire establishment: ‘If you had stopped migrant murders, Pavlos would be alive.’ As with previous attacks and murders by GD ‘soldiers’, party MPs denounced Fyssas’s murder and denied ever knowing Roupakias. Kourounis immediately contradicts these lies and provides ample evidence of Roupakias’s links to GD. He appears at popular rallies, in the trademark black shirt with the party’s logo – the

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ancient Greek meander which resembles a swastika. In the video footage, Roupakias receives orders from and escorts higher-ranking members and frantically looks for the lost phone of an MP. He appears as a follower and ‘courtier’, to use Kourounis’s words. The trial41 for Fyssas’s murder was over in 2019, with Roupakias and the instigators of hundreds of attacks remaining free. The leaders of Golden Dawn who were subpoenaed denied any knowledge of plans to kill Fyssas and denounced any affiliation with Roupakias. In the 2019 national elections, Golden Dawn received less than 3 per cent of the vote, forcing them out of the parliament. Yet, with the fascist party out of the parliament and numerous headquarters around Greece shutting down, the voters of Golden Dawn turned to another far-right candidate, Kyriakos Velopoulos, whose ‘Elliniki Lisi’ (Greek Solution) gained several seats. Velopoulos, although widely considered a caricature, regurgitates the bigotry and nationalism of Golden Dawn and has drawn the attention of the mass media, always hungry for a sensational headline. Despite the departure of the Golden Dawn Nazis, with little hope of ever recovering, far-right and conservative rhetoric maintain a firm footing in public discourse and politics. Indeed, the governing party of Kyriakos Mitsotakis managed to garner votes by opposing the Syriza government on the ‘sell-out’ of Macedonia, reproducing the nationalistic clichés that a large segment of the Greek population was eager to hear as they saw their Balkan neighbour officially acquire the title ‘North Macedonia’. New Democracy won many votes by reproducing the kind of populism and provincial nationalism that relies greatly on anti-immigrant sentiments. Since its victory, the government has been steadily opposing the entry of ‘illegal’ immigrants and ‘bogus asylum seekers’ with new asylum laws that aim at curbing migrant arrivals. Human rights organisations ‘claim the law will severely restrict access to safeguards for asylum seekers’.42 One of these measures has been the reduction of the time-period for asylum application processing to sixty days, which opposition parties and human rights organisations argue are way too few. Pointing the blame towards ‘bogus asylum seekers’, Mitsotakis himself mentioned during a parliamentary address in September 2019 that ‘enough is enough, enough with those people who know that they are not entitled to asylum and yet attempt to cross into and stay in our country’. At the same time, the government instigated several cleanup operations in the famous anarchist quarter of Exarcheia in central Athens, where anarchist squats in abandoned buildings have provided hospitality to refugees. Police raided and forcefully removed refugees, including children, and sealed the buildings, claiming that ‘Exarcheia is

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being returned to its people’. The refugees were transported to detention centres with an uncertain future lying ahead. In early 2020, a surge of arrivals on the islands of Lesbos and Chios were met by riot police squads who arrived on ferry boats from Athens, armed and ressembling a military regiment in their disciplined and orderly march. Their presence on the islands was part of government plans to evacuate the overpopulated camps and move refugees to sealed facilities where they could be closely monitored. Local populations resisted but were beaten and teargassed. Others organised local militias that tried to keep away incoming dinghies. Numerous videos were uploaded on social media platforms which showed local men and women shouting racist and bigoted rants to a pregnant woman and even children, keeping their inflatable dinghies from tying at the port. At the same time, government representatives commended the police for ‘doing their job’ and have yet to condemn the violence and disturbing footage that clearly displays multiple human rights violations.43 It is my conviction that, although Golden Dawn has lost its grasp, especially as its leading members were trialled for murder,44 the party’s nationalism and xenophobia are alive and well.

Notes 1. Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair, available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4P8gyTPy-kM. Accessed 19 December 2019. 4.1 Miles, available at https://vimeo.com/185717440. Accessed 20 December 2019. Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good, available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=y1mmEIAbviMandt=5s. Accessed 20 December 2019. 2. Nichols (2001), p. 112. 3. Papataxiarchis (2016), p. 6. 4. Smith and Rock (2014), pp. 58–9. 5. Torchin (2006), pp. 214–20. 6. Eitzen (1995), p. 85. 7. Nichols (2001), p. 110. 8. Ibid., p. 12. 9. Eitzen (1995), p. 84. 10. Chouliaraki (2008), p. 5. 11. In memory of Captain Kyriakos Papadopoulos, who passed away in 2018. 12. Papataxiarchis (2016), p. 6. 13. Iordanova (2010), p. 51. 14. Malik (1996), p. 204. 15. Panagopoulos (2019). 16. The numbers game is an erroneous one. It reduces people to numbers and indicators of a general trend. Numbers are often misleading and sources are not accurate enough. According to the International Organization

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

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for Migration (IOM), in 2015 the death toll reached 805 in the Eastern Mediterranean alone. See https://www.iom.int/news/iom-counts-3771migrant-fatalities-mediterranean-2015. Accessed 24 December 2019. Žižek (2002), p. 83. In 2019, a boulevard in Lesbos was named after Kyriakos Papadopoulos, honouring his memory and life-saving efforts. One year after the events in the film, the EU signed an agreement with Turkey to block migrant flows from Syria. This resulted in the entrapment of over 50,000 refugees in Greece. Chouliaraki (2008), p. 194. See ERT3 Social on YouTube, available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eb-pPPOEH20. Accessed 11 November 2019. Chouliaraki (2008), p. 129. Incidentally, certain parts of the film were reedited and combined with additional footage for a three-minute short, titled The Invisible Wall/To Aorato Teihos (Tsakiris 2011), available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vRVD65tbIRo. Here, the necessities of the tourist industry, the only source of income on the island, and fears shared by tourists and local entrepreneurs, serve as an invisible wall that turns the gateway to Europe into a purgatory. The invisible wall generates false threats, true hostility and divides locals and newcomers according to their status – refugees versus tourists, money versus poverty and guest versus unwanted stranger. On the matter of public health and alleged threats by migrants, a recent publication suggests that migrants entering Europe are healthier and live longer than Europeans in the host societies. According to the research team, ‘[P]ublic perception that migrants place an undue burden on societies is guiding governments across the globe to tighten access to health care and generate so-called hostile environments for these groups. Our findings contradict claims that migrants are a health burden in high-income countries and suggest that these policies do not align with the available evidence.’ Found online at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140– 6736(18)32781–8/fulltext. Accessed 2 December 2019. Personal interview with Kimon Tsakiris, September 2018. This kind of absurdity is not exclusive to the treatment of refugees. Greece has been regularly criticised by NGOs, activist groups and politicians for human rights violations in the so-called ‘hospitality centres’. The most recent report carried out by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment, which is part of the Council of Europe, is condemning on several fronts regarding the treatment of irregular migrants. Simultaneously, Greece was threatened in 2016 with expulsion from the Schengen Area for failing to effectively secure its borders (Panagopoulos 2019, p. 72). Arguably, sealing of the borders is in and of itself a violent initiative that requires violence. On human rights violations by police forces see the full report by Human Rights Watch, online at hrw

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

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.org/report/2013/06/12/unwelcome-guests/greek-police-abusesmigrants-athens#. Accessed 2 December 2019. Bauman (1998), p. 40. Biemann (2015), p. 98. See the full report online at https://www.frontexit.org/en/docs/49frontexbetween-greece-and-turkey-the-border-of-denial/file. Accessed 24 December 2019. Ellinas (2013). Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou (2018). For one resident of Aghios Panteleimon, GD did great work by ‘chasing all the blacks, who had flooded [us] even in my own building it was full of them [of blacks] but they left. Those who were the dirty ones and had all the diseases, left, because they had to.’ Found in Protagonistes, ‘Who is Golden Dawn?’, 14 May 2012. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=huPP0FfUEX0. Accessed 2 December 2019. Resident quoted at minute 16:35. Triandafyllidou and Kouki (2014), p. 419. Ellinas (2013), p. 547. Psarras (2014), p. 9. The pogroms unleashed at the squares, especially Aghios Panteleimon, feature in The Battle for Attica Square (2010), a short documentary by TV 2 Norway. Available at https://www.journeyman.tv/film/4942/the-battlefor-attica-square. Accessed 24 December 2019. Human Rights Watch report 2012. Available at http://www.hrw.org/sites/ default/files/reports/greece0712ForUpload.pdf. Accessed 1 November 2019. Benhabib (2017). Ellinas (2013), p. 548. An anecdotal incident narrated by Yorgos Korras highlights the complacency of the police and their support for GD. According to Korras, he and Constantine Giannaris were helping an Egyptian immigrant and his friend at his grocery store in Aghios Panteleimon when they were attacked suddenly by a group of Golden Dawners bearing clubs and chains. They barricaded themselves in the shop and waited for the police to come. After the police arrived, they asked the two directors what the immigrants did to them that forced the men to call the police. For more on this matter see Dimitris Psarras’s detailed investigation of Golden Dawn’s history and involvement with the Greek police forces (2012). You can follow the trial against Golden Dawn online at Golden Dawn Watch: http://goldendawnwatch.org/?page_id=420andlang=en. Accessed 20 December 2019. Smith (2019). Kitsantonis (2020).

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44. The trial of Golden Dawn finished in December 2019. The party’s members were declared innocent of any involvement in the murder of Fyssas, with Roupakias solely accused. The court’s decision could open the way for the party to return to mainstream politics by receiving state funding of up to six million euros.

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Filmography

12 Years a Slave (McQueen 2013) 4.1 Miles (Matziaraki 2016) Agon/Ksimeroma (Budina 2012) The Albanian/Der Albaner (Naber 2010) Alive!/Gjallë! (Minarolli 2009) American History X (Kaye 1998) Amnesty/Amnistia (Alimani 2011) The Aunt from Chicago/I Theia apo to Sikago (Sakellarios 1957) Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein 1925) Bend It Like Beckham (Chadah 2002) Better the Devil You Know/Papoutsi apo to topo sou (Sakellarios 1946) Bhaji on the Beach (Chadah 1993) Busulla/Compass (Alimani 2007) Caché/Hidden (Haneke 2005) Chinatown (Polanski 1974) Chromium/Krom (Alimani 2015) Correction/Diorthosi (Anastopoulos 2007) Daybreak/Le Jour se Lève (Carné 1939) Dheepan (Audiard 2015) Die Fremde/When We Leave (Aladag 2010) Dollars and Dreams/Dollaria kai Oneira (Daifas 1956) Eclipse/L’Eclisse (Antonioni 1962) Eduart (Antoniou 2006) El Greco (Smaragdis 2007) Ephemeral Town/Efimeri Poli (Zafiris 2000) Eternity and a Day/Mia Aioniotita kai mia Mera (Angelopoulos 1998) Fanouris and his Clan/O Fanouris Kai to Soi Tou (Ioannopoulos 1957) The Forgiveness of Blood (Marston 2011) From the Edge of the City/Ap tin Akri tis Polis (Giannaris 1998) From the Snow/Ap to Hioni (Goritsas 1993) Gas/Ygraerio (Alimani 2006) Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair (Kourounis 2016)

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Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good (Tsakiris 2017) Hostage/Omiros (Giannaris 2005) The Hunters/Oi Kinigoi (Angelopoulos 1977) The Invisible Wall/To Aorato Teihos (Tsakiris 2011) Journey of Hope (Koller 1990) Katoi/Kennel (Alimani 2002) Landscape in the Mist/Topio stin Omihli (Angelopoulos 1988) Liubi (Yourgou 2005) Mad City (Costa-Gavras 1997) Man at Sea (Giannaris 2011) A Man Escaped/Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (Bresson 1956) Miss Violence (Avranas 2013) Port of Shadows/Quai des Brumes (Carné 1938) North of Vortex (Giannaris 1991) One Day in August/Dekapentavgoustos (Giannaris 2002) Plato’s Academy/Akadimia Platonos (Tsitos 2009) Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955) Roadblocks/Kleistoi Dromoi (Ioannou 2000) Safe Sex (Reppas and Papathanasiou 1999), See You/Mirupafshim (Voupouras and Korras 1997) Stalker (Tarkovsky 1979) Sugartown: the Bridegrooms/Sugartown: Oi Gabroi (Tsakiris 2007) The Suspended Step of the Stork/To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou (Angelopoulos 1991) Talk to Her/Hable con Ella (Almodovar 2002) Tirana Year Zero (Koçi 2002) Touch of Spice/Politiki Kouzina (Mpoulmetis 2003) The Travelling Players/O Thiasos (Angelopoulos 1975) The Uncle from Canada/O Theios apo to Kanada (Fylaktos 1959) Valkanizater (Goritsas 1997) Voyage to Cythera/Taxidi sta Kythira (Angelopoulos 1984) The Way to the West/O Dromos Pros ti Dysi (Katzourakis 2003) A Woman’s Way/Strella (Koutras 2009) Xenia (Koutras 2014) Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis 1964)

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Index

4.1 Miles, 222, 225, 228–9, 232–4 9/11, 204 12 Years a Slave, 123n accented cinema, 12–13, 15, 25, 36, 38, 40, 42, 60–1, 66, 81 actuality see documentary adventure films, 231 Agamben, Giorgio bare life, 166, 168, 199, 206, 225, 228, 231 Agathonisi (island), 224, 233–8, 242 Agon, 24, 45, 47–52 Ahmed, Sara, 170 Akin, Fatih, 31n, 41, 43 Albania Albanian cinema, 40–1, 54n Albanian migration, 49, 70, 110, 116–17, 128, 135, 137 Albanophobia, 125, 127, 139, 179 Albanophone cinema, 40–1, 54n criminality (stereotype), 49, 50, 56–7, 62–3, 74, 103, 108, 119, 123, 126, 128, 148, 180 family, 14, 50–1, 136 slave (stereotype), 47, 118, 120, 126–7, 148–9, 179; see also stereotypes Alex (Man at Sea), 163–8 Alexander (Eternity and a Day), 157–62, 201 Alexandros (The Suspended Step of the Stork), 193, 200, 202–11 Alimani Bujar, 24, 36–47, 52 Savina, 36, 47 Almodovar, Pedro Talk to Her, 191 Anastopoulos, Thanos, 26, 45–7, 146–50

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Anderson, Benedict imagined communities, 5, 16, 165 Angelopoulos, Theo Eternity and a Day, 26, 145, 147, 157–61, 169, 172, 183, 201–2, 213 Landscape in the Mist, 193 sequence shot, 69, 210, 214 The Hunters, 201 The Suspended Step of the Stork, 2, 18, 26, 158, 197, 200–2, 205, 211, 213, 238 The Travelling Players, 201 Ulysses’ Gaze, 158, 171n Voyage to Cythera, 201 Antoniou, Angeliki, 19, 24–5, 56–7, 69–5, 125, 135, 138–9 Arendt, Hannah, 199–200 Athens human rights violations against migrants, 60, 242–3 as a place of alienation, 84, 92, 180 as a residence for migrants, 14, 41, 60, 219–20 Athens Police, 62, 245–6 Greek Film Archive, 40 illegal activities in Athens, 73, 135, 138, 182, 218 in Alimani’s experience, 39–41 Kurdish refugees in Athens, 79–80, 88, 99, 222n migration to, 14, 86, 177, 191–2, 235, 238–9 street art in, 194 wandering through, 148 working-class suburbs of, 41, 68, 153, 174 Badiou, Alain, 168 Bako, Eduart (Eduart), 69–71, 135–9, 186

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Bako, Raman (Eduart), 135–6, 186 Balibar, Ėtienne, 108 Balkan region Balkan cinema and film production, 14, 36, 40, 44, 47, 52, 56, 70–1, 75–6 borders, 14 communist regimes 5, 179 migration routes in the, 7, 233 nationalisms, 41, 120 North Macedonia, 245 relationship between Greece and the Balkans 5, 141, 201 stereotypes about Balkan culture, 5, 51–2, 67, 126, 128, 140, 179; see also stereotypes The Balkan Prospect (Calotychos), 23 bare life, 168, 199, 206, 225, 228, 231 Barthes, Roland see photography Battleship Potemkin, 151 Bauman, Zygmunt, 133, 146, 165, 238 Bazin, André documentary, 210 Italian neorealism, 86, 89–90 Bergfelder, Tim, 43 Berghahn, Daniela diasporic cinema, 1, 12 queer cinema, 175, 176 Bhabha, Homi difference, 130, 142 stereotyping, 126 Black sea region see Pontic region border Albanian, 108, 159–61 crossing, 2, 25, 36–7, 52, 104–5, 108, 112, 126, 137, 190, 205, 220 Greek–Albanian, 24, 49, 69, 104, 112–14, 116, 139, 177 subject, 25, 104–7, 112–16, 119–21, 147, 207 syndrome see Kapllani Budina, Robert, 24, 36–7, 45, 48, 50–2 Bulku, Rajmonda, 66, 68–9 Caché, 32n, 100 Calotychos, Vangelis, The Balkan Prospect, 23 Celik, Ipek, 97, 100, 210 Chadha, Gurinder, 51

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children caring for children, 231 children playing, 212, 219 immigrant children, 244 innocence, 162 refugee children, 28n, 30n, 199, 204, 245–6 suffering children, 229–32 victims of trafficking (child-workers), 158, 160, 162, 169 Chinatown, 189 Chios (island), 246, 258n Chouliaraki, Lilie, 232 citizenship access to Greek citizenship, 172, 6, 26, 38, 94, 96, 127, 157,175, 190–2, 194, 196n, 199 policy, 1, 72, 182 claustrophobia, 25, 42, 80, 82–3, 85, 104, 107, 109, 114–15, 162 colonialism neo-colonialism, 220 post-colonialism, 11 Correction, 26, 45, 47, 50–1, 146–7, 152, 157, 169, 172 cosmopolitanism, 14, 20, 44, 56, 58, 158, 162, 202 critical reception Eduart, 73–5 From the Edge of the City, 183 Hostage, 63–7 Roadblocks, 20, 23–4, 35, 37, 39, 56–7, 63, 65–6, 73–4, 76, 86, 101, 114, 173, 224, 227 Deleuze, Gilles bal(l)ade, 83, 89 Derrida, Jacques conditional hospitality, 155, 166, 178, 182 hostage situation, 164, 166 unconditional hospitality, 129, 140, 164, 170n diaspora Albanian diaspora in Greece, 46, 66–7 co-ethnic Greeks in the Balkans, 5, 60–1, 172–3 definition, 37–8, 59

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INDEX

diaspora and cinema, 35, 42, 182 diaspora and language, 162 diaspora and queerness, 175 diasporic chronotopes (Naficy), 211 experience of, 2, 83, 85, 101, 136 Kurdish diaspora, 81, 83, 85, 101 studies, 45 diasporic cinema, 36, 38, 43, 48–9, 51, 52, 58–60, 66, 76, 80, 87, 211 discrimination against Ethnic Greeks, 127, 179 against migrants and refugees, 1, 5, 7, 38–9, 46, 105, 108, 147, 198 displacement compassion towards the displaced, 225 displaced children, 160 displaced Greeks and co-Ethnics, 160, 162–3, 173, 187, 211–12 displacement and accented cinema, 3, 13, 36, 38, 60, 89 displacement and Athens, 220 displacement and exclusion, 11–12, 38, 106 displacement and symbolism, 218 displacement and togetherness, 95, 220 displacement and wandering, 91 displacement of Kurdish people, 83, 85–6 mass displacement, 205, 218, 220, 226 tragedy of, 2–3, 26, 88, 146, 189, 198, 201, 213, 216, 233 docudrama 81, 85–6, 91, 99, 216 documentary definition, 80, 223n, 226 documentary aesthetics, 86–9, 91, 98, 129, 135, 168, 218, 231 documentary and activism, 225 documentary and blend of genres, 24, 26, 203, 216–17, 220 documentary truth, 81, 84, 226, 231 ethics of, 81, 101, 231 Framed Youth (Giannaris), 58 Nichols, Bill, 218, 223n, 225–6 observational mode of, 224 Roadblocks, 91 Sugar Town: The Bride Groom (Tsakiris), 65 The Way to the West (Karoutzakis), 200, 216

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Dogtooth, 22–3, 103, 196n drama 61, 228 Dyer, Richard, 156, 191 Eduart (film), 24–5, 32n, 56–7, 65, 69–76, 125, 128, 135, 138–9, 142, 172, 186 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris, 19–20, 72 embodied protest, 105–6 ephemerality and encounters, 142 and home, 211, 213 and utopia, 213 Ephemeral Town, 20, 26, 32n, 197, 210–15 Ephemeral Town, 20, 26, 32n, 197, 210–15 Eternity and a Day, 26, 145, 147, 157–61, 169, 172, 183, 201–2, 213 Eurocentrism, 14–16, 23, 26, 37, 119, 137, 165, 207 Exarcheia (neighbourhood in Athens), 245 family Albanian family, 14, 40–51, 136 family trope (motherland, fatherland), 127, 162, 173, 176, 180, 182; see also motherland; fatherland; patriarchy foster family, 49 Greek family, 33n, 50n, 57, 60, 62, 126, 190 surrogate family, 151, 167 father and hospitality, 140 and patriarchy, 48–9, 109–10, 140, 186, 188–9; see also patriarchy as nation, 190, 192–4; see also fatherland; family; patriarchy estranged father, 141 nativity scene, 211 single father, 41–2 surrogate father, 50, 138, 158 symbolic father, 69, 186, 188, 191–3, 196n; see also Koulouris, Dimitris fatherland (patrida), 127, 176, 180, 182 Fortress Europe, 1, 6, 23–4, 79–81, 83–4, 95, 97, 99, 100–1, 104, 146, 173, 199, 205–6, 216, 234–5, 238 fortress mentality, 1, 6, 231

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G R E E K C I N E M A A N D M I G R AT I O N

The Free Besieged (Solomos), 161 From the Edge of the City, 26, 58, 61, 68, 172–6, 182–3, 189, 191 Frontex (European Border and Coastguard Agency), 9, 238–9 Fyssas, Pavlos, 244–5 Gas (Alimani), 41–3 Gavras, Costas, 76–7n gay identity camp, 175, 190–1, 193, 194 gay characters, 8, 175, 188, 190–3 Gay Pride, 60 Gay Youth Video Collective, 58 homophobia, 193 gender British cinema, 58 family trope (motherland, fatherland), 127, 162, 173, 176, 180, 182; see also motherland; fatherland; patriarchy hybridity, 191 inequality, 175 norms and stereotypes, 6, 106, 167, 231; see also patriarchy place of women, 106, 267, 231; see also patriarchy queer cinema, 58, 60, 174–5, 188–90 queerness, 59, 135, 174–5, 185 genre adventure films, 231 docudrama, 81, 85–6, 91, 99, 216 documentary, 24, 26–7, 58, 65, 80–1, 84, 86–9, 91, 98, 101, 129, 135, 168, 198, 200, 204, 216–18, 220, 224–6, 231, 233 drama, 61, 228 generic conventions of popular cinema, 15 melodrama, 15, 19, 33n, 89, 122 musical, 175 popular genre films see Old Greek cinema road movie, 13–15, 106, 133, 175 thriller, 61, 150, 163 Georgiadis, Adonis, 9 Giannaris Constantine filmmaker, 13, 56–1, 63–9, 73, 103–4, 107–10, 112, 115, 117–20, 122, 163–4, 166, 172, 182–6, 188–90

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Hostage, 24–5, 32n, 56–7, 59, 61–8, 75, 103–4, 108, 110–12, 119, 121, 127, 137, 172–3, 189, 238, 244 One Day in August, 63–4 From the Edge of the City, 26, 58, 61, 68, 172–6, 182–3, 189, 191 Man at Sea, 26, 145, 147, 163–5, 169, 172, 189, 198 North of Vortex, 59 Shards, 59 globalisation, 1, 5, 13, 15, 21, 26, 35, 38, 45, 56–7, 59, 75, 146, 153–4, 162, 198, 214, 220, 228–9, 234, 238 Golden Dawn (GD), 6, 9, 27, 60, 64, 74, 170n, 176, 190, 193, 224–7, 236–7, 239–45 Goritsas, Sotiris From the Snow, 14, 172–3, 177, 181–3 Valkanizater, 14 Graal Digital Creations, 67 Greek Film Centre (GFC) 16, 18, 20, 57, 64–5, 67, 70–2, 80, 164 Hall, Stuart diaspora, 59, 61, 141 representation, 142, 152 hegemony hegemonic discourse, 21, 26, 130, 225 hegemonic identity, 80, 121, 146, 154, 172, 231 hegemony and cinema, 9–15, 80, 86–7, 143, 145–6, 217, 220 hegemony and hybridity, 87, 217 of Hollywood, 75 political, 129 relationship between diaspora and host nations, 38 Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), 20, 32n, 40–1, 45, 71 Higbee, Will, 21 Higson, Andrew, 19 Hollywood, 12, 15, 17, 19, 35–6, 38–9, 43, 75, 188–9, 204, 233 Homeland, 37, 44, 47–8, 59–61, 66, 96, 99, 105, 172–4, 176, 181, 187, 197, 204, 208, 211, 219; see also family homophobia, 193

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INDEX

homosexuality see gay identity hospitality, 26, 51, 92, 129, 130–1, 139–40, 147, 149, 152–3, 155–6, 163–4, 166–7, 177–8, 180–2, 194, 245; see also Derrida host family, 48 host nation, 3, 9, 12–15, 19, 24, 26, 35, 37–8, 42, 48–9, 67, 87, 91, 97–8, 104–6, 105–7, 112, 121–2, 126–7, 145, 147–8, 153, 183, 190, 208, 219–22 host society see host nation Hostage see Giannaris, Constantine Hoxha, Enver, 44, 106, 127, 129, 133, 135, 145, 173, 176 hybridity hybridity and cinema, 10 hybridity and cultural difference, 21 hybridity and in-betweenness, 175 hybridity and intersectionality, 190 hybridity and migrant journeys, 80 identity accepting one’s identity, 47, 141–2, 188 collective identity, 174 cosmopolitan identity, 44 cultural identity, 91–2, 24 essentialising identity, 26, 128, 143, 225–6 European identity, 2 forced identity, 110, 143 Greek identity, 60, 66, 68, 80, 141, 143 hegemonic identity, 172; see also hegemony identity and cinema, 17, 19, 23, 25, 58, 183 identity and globalisation, 21 identity and hybridity, 59–60, 175 identity and space, 106, 164 identity and victimhood, 189; see also victimhood identity consciousness, 37 identity crisis, 2, 16, 26, 97, 121, 145–6 174 Kurdish identity, 95, 97 loss or death of identity, 105, 117, 121, 128, 158, 214

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male identity, 135; see also gender national identity, 4–6, 12–13, 16, 60, 86, 148, 244 otherness, 10, 25, 105, 114, 117, 120, 132, 145–7, 151–3, 155, 157, 160–1, 163, 166–8, 173, 211 queer identity, 59, 135, 174–5, 185, see also gender; queerness sexual identity, 58, 68, 183, 190–1 unconventional identities, 125, 133–4, 143, 185–7, 190–1, 203 interstitiality, 15, 22, 60, 80, 87, 91, 116, 165, 202 Ioannou, Stavros, 79–81, 85–91, 93, 95–6, 98–9, 101, 101n Iordanova, Dina supranational cinema, 20, 44 Islam Islamic tradition, 99 Islamophobia, 7, 28n, 236 Muslim migrants and refugees, 7, 166, 182, 208, 241 Jarman, Derek, 58, 188 journey homecoming, 210–11, 215 of homelessness, 210 of hope, 2, 24, 80, 104, 173, 220–1 Journey of Hope (Koller), 2 Kapplani, Gazmend A Short Border Handbook, 104 border syndrome, 25, 103–7, 112, 116–17, 147–8, 206 Karalis, Vrasidas, 23, 121, 146, 153 Kate (Man at Sea), 165–7, 189 Katzourakis, Kyriakos, 197, 216–18, 220 Kennel, 40 Korras, Yorgos, 14, 24, 39, 45, 125, 129, 135, 142–3 Koulouris Dimitris, 64, 69 Yorgos, 62, 64 Kourounis, Angeliki Golden Dawn: Personal Affair, 27, 225, 227, 240–5 Kristeva, Julia, 146 Kurdistan, 79–81, 85, 88, 90–1, 95–6, 98–101, 205, 220

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G R E E K C I N E M A A N D M I G R AT I O N

L’Eclisse (Antonioni), 151 Lefebvre, Henri The Right to the City, 91–2, 94 Lesbos (island), 7–8, 200, 212, 224, 227–8, 231–3, 246; see also photography Loshitzky, Yosefa hegemonic cinema, 146 identity, 2, 127, 146 journey of hope, 24, 104, 173 screening metaphor, 127 Screening Strangers, 2 Macedonia see North Macedonia Malik, Sarita cinema of duty, 10–11, 43, 228 Man at Sea, 26, 145, 147, 163–5, 169, 172, 189, 198 Mandragos, Andreas (Ephemeral Town), 211–15 Matziaraki, Daphne (4.1 Miles), 27, 224, 226–9, 231, 234 melodrama, 15, 19, 33n, 89, 122 Menidi (neighbourhood in Athens), 174, 183–4, 188 migrant cinema see diasporic cinema Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 9, 244–5 mobility freedom of movement, 2, 14, 133, 237 in film production, 36 on screen, 3, 13, 104–5, 108, 118, 134, 159 restrictions to mobility, 24, 38, 80, 83, 88, 162, 234, 238 Moria (camp), 7, 8, 30n, 40n, 200, 209, 234 mother as home or nation, 68, 96, 213 becoming a, 221 in Christian Orthodox doctrine (Mary), 64, 68, 218 motherly figure, 66, 68–9, 108, 110, 137, 139–40, 152, 167, 186, 193, 211–12 ; see also patriarchy nativity scene, 211–12 separation from the, 66, 85, 93, 96, 118, 119, 134, 137, 156, 212–13 surrogate, 167, 231 motherland, 162, 173; see also mother musical, 175

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myth Greek myth, 216 of Albanian criminality, 103, 126, 128; see also stereotypes of hospitality (philoxenia), 194, 236 of Ulysses, 157–8, 215 of unity and coherence, 35 Naficy, Hamid accented cinema, 12–13, 15, 25, 36, 38, 40, 42, 60–1, 66, 81 border subject, 25, 104–7, 112–16, 119–21, 147, 207 chronotope, 25, 85, 177, 211–13 embodied protest, 105–6 epistolarity, 85, 87, 90, 92–3, 99, 173 exilic life, 12, 24, 42, 79, 81, 87–8, 91, 93, 96, 98–9, 123n 173, 217 liminality, 81, 89–91, 173 overcompensation, 120, 147 nationality Greek certificate of nationality, 57, 72 mixed nationality, 58 nationality and ethnicity, 12, 231 nationality and cinema, 19, 71–2 Greek nationality, 6, 24, 57, 71–3, 75, 190; see also identity New Democracy (Nea Dimokratia, party), 9, 244–5 New Greek cinema, 3, 17–18, 22, 89, 183 Nichols, Bill, 218, 223n, 225–6 North Macedonia, 7, 19, 71, 76, 129, 174, 233, 245 Öcalan, Abdullah, 102n Old Greek cinema, 4, 12, 16–17 Orientalism (Said), 29n otherness, 10, 25, 105, 114, 117, 120, 132, 145–7, 151–3, 155, 157, 160–1, 163, 166–8, 173, 211; see also identity Oxymoron Films (production company), 41 Papadimitriou, Lydia, 22, 54n Papadopoulos, Kyriakos (Captain), 229–33, 238, 247n Papadopoulos, Stathis Hostage, 67, 189 From the Edge of the City, 68, 185, 189

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INDEX

Papanikolaou, Dimitris, 161, 174, 185–6 Papataxiarchis, Evthymios, 224, 227 pathos, 25, 100, 103, 114, 156, 161–2 patriarchy, 26, 33n, 44, 49, 69–70, 85, 91, 99–100, 109–12, 118–19, 127–8, 134–6, 138–9, 141, 143, 182–3, 186–7, 189, 207, 236 photography elderly women in Lesbos, 231 Ephemeral Town, 212, 214–15 Plato’s Academy, 156–7, 212 Roadblocks, 79 Pisli, Flamur, 61–2, 65–7, 103–4, 108 Plato’s Academy, 17, 22, 26, 48, 51, 55n, 145, 147, 152–3, 157, 169, 170n, 172, 212 Pontian Greek (Russo-Pontian), 67, 172–4, 182–5, 187–90; see also Pontic region Pontic region, 26, 172–3 queerness queer cinema, 58, 60, 174–5, 188–190 queer desire, 59, 185 Rawle, Steven Transnational Cinema: An Introduction, 21 refugee camp, 2, 51, 177, 180, 182, 198, 200, 210 characters, 158, 162–9, 197–219, 222 children, 28n, 30n, 199, 204 crisis, 27, 163, 225–8, 231 definition, 30n representation overrepresentation, 103, 210, 215, 221, 243 migrant representation, 3, 22–3, 48, 81, 217–18 misrepresentation, 10–11, 199, 217, 228; see also stereotypes road movie, 13–15, 106, 133, 175 Roadblocks, 20, 24–5, 32n, 79–83, 85–7, 89–92, 96–7, 99–100, 102n, 172–3, 226, 238 Safe Sex, 18 Said, Edward, 29n, 89

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Saimir (Agon), 48–51 Sasha (From the Edge of the City), 183–9, 191, 195n See You, 14, 20, 24–5, 39, 45, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135, 139–40, 142–3, 172, 191 Senja, Elion (Hostage), 65–8, 104–5, 108–22, 127, 137–8, 189, 244 Soldatos, Yannis, 16 Solomos, Dionysios, 161 stereotypes about Albanians and Albanian criminality, 4, 49–50, 57, 119, 125–6, 131, 148, 153, 154, 179–80 about Balkan culture, 5, 51–2, 67, 126, 128, 140, 179 about Eastern European women, 18 about refugees and migrants, 197, 215 arbitrary logic of stereotyping, 126, 217 of Greek racists, 48, 122 (pitfalls of) positive stereotyping, 135, 148 stranger Screening Strangers (Loshitzky), 2 Strangers at Our Door (Bauman), 2 surrogate family, 151, 167, 177 father, 138, 158 mother, 167 status, 149, 167 The Suspended Step of the Stork, 2, 18, 26, 158, 197, 200–2, 205, 211, 213, 238 Synaspismos (party), 95 Syriza (party), 8–9, 228, 245 sweep operation against Albanian immigrants, 62, 128 against Greek co-Ethnics, 173, 180 definition, 6 Ministry of Public Order, 29n Thessaloniki city, 47, 158, 193 International Film Festival, 41 thriller, 61, 150, 163 Tirana (city), 39, 52, 128 Tirana Year Zero, 40

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G R E E K C I N E M A A N D M I G R AT I O N

trafficking children (Eternity and a Day), 158, 160, 162, 169 traffickers, 158–9, 162, 165, 167, 169 women, 48, 187, 189, 197, 216, 218, 220–1, 223n transnationalism transnational cinema, 15, 21, 41, 49, 75, 133, 138, 164 transnational film discourse, 21, 220 transnational film studies, 35, 37, 51 Tsakiris, Kimon Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good, 27, 224, 233, 239 Sugartown: the Bridegrooms, 65 Tsitos, Filippos, 17, 26, 145, 154 Ulysses, 157–8, 215 vagabond, 132–5, 143 Valkanizater see Goritsas, Sotiris Van Sant, Gus My Own Private Idaho, 187 victimhood agency, 95, 101, 138, 160, 175, 190 bare life (Agamben), 168 embodied protest, 118, 122 exclusion, 3, 25, 234 female victimhood, 187–8, 221; see also trafficking Fortress Europe and Eurocentrism, 23, 105, 119 hierarchy of, 205, 215, 236

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migrant tragedy, 27, 105 pitfalls of victimhood, 69, 99, 119, 160, 190, 206, 216, 226, 229, 231; see also hegemony racism and racist violence, 25, 39, 46, 56, 97, 107, 126, 148–9, 169, 179; see also stereotypes silent victimhood, 27, 198; see also stereotypes victimhood and otherness, 166 voluntary victimisation (overcompensation), 107, 147; see also Naficy Vini (Agon), 48–9, 51 violence migrant-related, 7, 99, 165, 208, 210; see also victimhood systemic, 49, 99, 122, 233 Voupouras, Christos, 14, 39, 125, 129, 135, 141–3 The Way to the West, 26, 197, 216–18, 221 white guilt, 11, 32n Williams, Alan national cinema, 57, 75 Xenia (film), 26, 172, 175–6, 190–3 Xenia (hotel), 194 Zirek, Mizouri (Roadblocks), 80, 82, 84–5, 87–9, 93–4, 98–101 Žižek, Slavoj, 132 Zorba the Greek, 19

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