9781474437059 Greek Cinema

Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016

66503_Phillis.indd503_Phillis.indd i 228/10/208/10/20 9:539:53 PMPM To my mentor Yorgos, For his precious teachings and unshakeable love of cinema

66503_Phillis.indd503_Phillis.indd iiii 228/10/208/10/20 9:539:53 PMPM Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016

Philip E. Phillis

66503_Phillis.indd503_Phillis.indd iiiiii 228/10/208/10/20 9:539:53 PMPM 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

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List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Greek Immigration Cinema 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 250 Bibliography 252 Index 265

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1.1 Panayotis, the Albanian restaurant owner, enjoying the service of his Greek employee Yorgos, in Correction 47 1.2 Saimir standing, forced to choose between his loyalty to his Greek and Albanian families, in Agon 52 3.1 ‘Don’t talk now. Shut up!’ Entrapment and clandestinity manifest in the back of a truck in Roadblocks 82 3.2 Ahmet kisses a letter from home in Roadblocks 93 3.3 An ‘empathic close-up’ of a Kurdish mourner in Roadblocks 97 4.1 Elion appears entirely trapped in the claustrophobic enclosure of the bus in Hostage 113 4.2 The postures of clandestine migration: Elion appears hunched behind a bush in Hostage 116 4.3 Embodied protest: Elion displays the scars on his body, in a close-up in Hostage 121 6.1 Yorgos finally manages to ‘break into’ Ornela’s apartment in Correction 150 6.2 Stavros appearing out of place in his own home, in Plato’s Academy 154 6.3 Marenglen appearing out of place in Plato’s Academy 156 6.4 Alexander is forced to buy the boy from the traffickers in Eternity and a Day 159 6.5 Alexander displays his paternalistic stance in Eternity and a Day 160 6.6 Alex addresses the refugees from a position that displays his hierarchical placement in Man at Sea 165 6.7 The refugees cut themselves, performing embodied protest in Man at Sea 168 7.1 An uncomfortable coexistence between indigenous and Ethnic Greeks in From the Snow 178 7.2 A monumental shot of the queer protagonists of From the Edge of the City 184 7.3 Sasha is confronted by his strict father before being beaten, while the mother watches complaisantly in From the Edge of the City 186

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7.4 Dany confronts the symbolic father in Xenia 192 8.1 A group of refugees tightly framed within immobile train carriages in The Suspended Step of the Stork 204 8.2 A Kurdish refugee slits his wrist in protest over accusations of betrayal in The Suspended Step of the Stork 208 8.3 Brechtian distantiation: the Kurdish refugee hanging in the distance in The Suspended Step of the Stork 209 8.4 An objective establishing shot renders the masses of refugees in essentialist terms in Ephemeral Town 214 8.5 Wretched ‘boat people’ departing again to open sea in Ephemeral Town 215 9.1 A close-up on a crying boy amplifies the drama and tragedy of the scene in 4.1 Miles 230 9.2 A close-up of Captain Papadopoulos in 4.1 Miles. At the back we can discern an icon of St Nicholas 232 9.3 The gross inequalities between tourists and refugees displayed in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good 235 9.4 A local man slaps an African refugee and threatens to deport him in Greek History X: Summer on the Island of Good 237 9.5 Golden Dawn members and followers make public displays of power like a Nazi militia in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair 241 9.6 Haris Mexas proudly shows off his prized copy of Mein Kampf in Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair 242

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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. P hilip E. Phillis

66503_Phillis.indd503_Phillis.indd vviiiiii 228/10/208/10/20 9:539:53 PMPM INTRODUCTION 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 men- tality, 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 moderni- sation 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 Euro- pean 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, embody- ing 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 trans- gressing 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 émi- grés,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 cohe- sion.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 Alba- nians, 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 irre- dentism, 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 insta- bility 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 Euro- pean 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 Alba- nian 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 dis- solving, 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, Fron- tex, which is responsible for pushbacks, a term which indicates block- ing 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 prej- udice 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 Macedo- nian border, where refugees waited indefinitely to be processed. In 2016, the EU–Turkey Joint Action Plan furthered European efforts to hin- der 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 over- crowded 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 humani- tarian 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 com- passion 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 dan- gerous 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. Tsip- ras 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 popu- list 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 deporta- tions 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 film- makers63 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 enun- ciation 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 oppo- sitions. 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 post- colonialism 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 vicis- situdes 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, under- mining 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 Stern- berg are, in addition, critical of a strictly linear approach and binary clas- sification 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 border- crossings 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 Constan- tine 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 circula- tion of cultural capital in post-1989 Europe. Giannaris and Angelopou- los 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 post- 1989 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, con- sidering 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. Sotir is 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 Val- kanizater (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 pleth- ora 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 experi- ences, 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 con- straints 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 sear- ing 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 postmod- ern 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 coun- terculture 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 Eurim- ages. 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 parlia- ment 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 accessibil- ity 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 (Rep- pas 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 spin- off. Safe Sex spawned numerous other farcical sex comedies with titil- lating 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 inter- ruptions, 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 Alba- nian, 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 embod- ies 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 art- house 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 (Ioan- nou 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 inau- gural 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 stu- dents 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 empha- sise 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 under- stood 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 occa- sion, used simply to indicate international co-production or collaboration between technical and artistic personnel from across the world, without any real consider- ation 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 Lan- guage 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 Alba- nian filmmakers, the relationship between film and mainstream media, ste- reotyping 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 Chap- ter 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 construc- tions 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’. C orrection/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’. P lato’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, evok- ing 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, T he Suspended Step of the Stork, Ephemeral Town and The Way to the West/O Dromos Pros ti Dysi (Kat- zourakis 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 pro- totypical 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. G reek 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 challeng- ing 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 migrant- receiving 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 vex- ing 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 pol- lutant 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 (Sakellar- ios 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_WYrndP- gEe8mLfj5UteCMZXdoygBYa45SKQb6ewvgzbeAA. 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 explana- tions in the discourse of ‘Balkanism’ which has been widely theorised in con- nection 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 imme- diately 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. Doc- tors in fact reported they were treating one rape victim per week, the young- est 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-tou- kyt/?fbclid=IwAR0kYh2n7A8Zc-CFp9OjNo0ahGzWnyFbvDj0qy0kL96nJr- w8Of8NZkmMjd0. 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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.kathimerini.gr/852891/article/epikairothta/politikh/emfylios-ston-syriza- gia-th-symfwnia-me-thn-agkyra. Accessed 30 April 2020. 52. ‘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/nosokomeiake- perithalpse-mono-gia-ellenes-. Accessed 16 October 2019. 53. ‘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-aystira- metra-sto-metanasteytiko-poia-einai-ta-kena-sto-nomo-gia-to-asylo. Accessed 9 October 2019. 54. ‘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-barkes- me-toys-metanastes-binteo. Accessed 6 October 2019. 55. See https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/greece/ report-greece/. Accessed 21 October 2019. 56. Dell’ Orto and Wetzstein (2019), p. 3. 57. Ballesteros (2015), p. 3. 58. Ibid., p. 12. 59. Loshitzky (2010), p. 9. 60. Santaolalla (2010), p. 152. 61. 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. 62. Ponzanesi (2012), p. 676. 63. 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). 64. Pines (1996), p. 183. 65. Williamson [1987] (1996), pp. 173–82. 66. Malik (1996), p. 202. 67. Pines (1996), p. 183. 68. Hall (1997), p. 235. 69. See Tarr (2007), pp. 3–7; Higbee (2013), pp.1–25; Ballesteros (2015), pp. 156–67. 70. See Ponzanesi (2012), pp. 675–90; Loshitzky (2010), pp. 61–76. 71. Ballesteros (2015), p. 15.

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72. An ideal example of such a film is Michael Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (2005). 73. See Naficy (2001), p. 15; Higbee (2007), pp. 51–64; Higbee (2013), pp. 61–95. 74. Naficy (2001), p. 4. 75. Berghahn and Sternberg (2010), p. 17. 76. Naficy (2001), p. 4. 77. For more on mobility and the post-1989 road movie, see Galt (2006); Eleftheriotis (2010); Gott and Herzog (2015). 78. Mulvey (2006). 79. For an analytical discussion on travel in Greek film in the period I examine, see Lykidis (2015). 80. Hall (1992), p. 47. 81. Berghahn and Sternberg (2010), p. 41. 82. 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). 83. Schrader and Winkler (2013), p. 10. 84. By ‘contemporary’ I mean the period from 1990 to the present. 85. Higbee and Lim (2010), p. 9. 86. Schlesinger (2000), p. 22. 87. Higson (2000), p. 66. 88. Soldatos (1995). 89. Skopeteas (2002). 90. Hayward (1993), p. 37. 91. Papadimitriou (2011), p. 495. 92. Ibid., p. 496. 93. Chalkou (2008). 94. Karalis (2012), pp. 163–8. 95. Ibid., p. 193. 96. Stjernholm (2016) . 97. Karalis (2012), p. 218. 98. 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 Ukrain- ian 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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