The 2023 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

At one of the pitching workshops at the 25th annual Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, an experienced American documentarian advised a budding filmmaker not to get too bogged down in the “local,” to always remember the global reach of a story. This is advice the Greek Stavros Psillakis has spent four decades ignoring. Almost entirely made for Greek television, his “anthropological” films are defiantly local, narrow even. He always adapts his style—which at first glance appears to be anonymous reportage—to the specificity of the subject at hand, letting any wider, more “global” meanings take care of themselves. 

In this, he is the total opposite of someone like Nikolaus Geyrhalter, his fellow recipient of an extensive tribute at this year’s festival. Geyrhalter practices the “International Style” of festival filmmaking, adaptable to both fiction and nonfiction, the cinematic equivalent of starchitecture. Its constituents are the same, whatever the subject matter—meticulously composed long shot tableaux in long takes, often in black and white (I always sense the filmmaker just off-camera, fingers on a stopwatch); usually no music or voice-over; no talking heads, just humanity distanced and decentered. In these pseudomodernist films, there are no concessions to the audience which must come to the work rather than the other way round. His films are a prize-winning fixture of festivals around the world, released in DVD box sets, and written about in all the main film magazines. Psillakis is barely known outside Greece—certainly, I had never heard of him before the festival.

Psillakis’s films could be made only in Greece, and are acutely sensitive to region, accent, gesture, and class. His films are so local that he named arguably his greatest work after the back street where it was filmed, 120 Milonoghianni, Chania (2011) in his hometown on Crete. This is as close to fly-on-the-wall cinema as you can get—Psillakis shot and sound-recorded it entirely himself, the effacement of the technical apparatus helped by his long-term friendship with his subjects, two scooter mechanics on the verge of retirement.

The film was made during the financial crisis that hit Greece in 2009, and shows many people unemployed, unable to pay the mechanics for their work. A joke about Angela Merkel, then German chancellor and the most important single figure in the European Union (EU), reminded audiences at the festival of the cost-cutting demanded of Greece by the EU as the price of a bailout. This cost-cutting resulted in the devastation of public services such as the railway. This year’s festival took place days after fifty-seven passengers were killed and many others injured when the train from Athens to Thessaloniki crashed. The subsequent mass protests into the corruption and neglect that led to the accident took place mostly in Athens—I noticed only some graffiti and a few banners in the university sector of Thessaloniki, away from the festival center. Nevertheless, the festival cancelled all ceremonies, sidebars, and social events to commemorate the crash victims.  

Historical traces of similar Greek tragedy inform 120 Milonoghianni, Chania, but the overall tone is one of revelation and joy. The film is one of the great portraits of aging masculinity. The subjects are a double act—Nikos the dapper clown, Thodoris the straight man. The shop, like the barbershop or beauty parlor in other cultures, is a hub of the community, especially for the derelict, the forgotten, the marginal. The mechanics repair old, broken things so that they will work a bit longer—just as they perform social and psychological repair on their customers. The film also continues Psillakis’s unshowy interest in self-reflexivity. At one point, the mechanics “direct” Psillakis, using his camera to film a woman they admire. Another man tells him to move out of the way as he tries to park. Throughout, Psillakis is talked to as part of the ad hoc group, offered food and drink, in an unassuming manner. He almost achieves the impossible dream of direct cinema—the erasure of the wall separating filmmaker and filmed. But it is a style that only works for this film—each subject demands from Psillakis, and gets, its own approach.

By contrast, Geyrhalter’s latest film Matter Out of Place (2022) could have been set anywhere. Although filmed in Europe, Nepal, and the United States, there are no identifying captions; at a Q&A after the screening, Geyrhalter stated that the individual locations didn’t matter, that the problems faced in each place are representative of universal problems. Our American mentor quoted above would approve. Matter shows the global treatment of waste via the processes of dumping, collection, landfill, burning, recycling, and—the most common—neglect.

Matter is less austere than previous Geyrhalter films—here characters talk and provide information, while their interaction is allowed to be interesting in its own right. Long shots are occasionally interspersed with sequences broken down into shorter scenes. There is movement of the camera, especially when if follows vehicles—these are the film’s most invigorating moments, when the general stasis of process meets the energy of people. More usually, however, process wins out. One figure—a Nepali refuse collector—threatens to become a “character” in the Psillakis sense, rather than an anonymous representative of geopolitical processes, through his perseverance, good humor, skill, and ingenuity. One remarkable sequence showing rubbish trucks attempting to move up impassable dirt tracks, stands for the Sisyphean task facing all those dealing with our waste. Other memorable scenes cover the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, contrasting its right-on eco credentials with the small military campaign needed to clear up after it; and the Swiss Alps, where the same technology used to transport tourists to mountains for skiing is used to move refuse from collection centers to recycling plants. 

This film about disgusting rubbish is comprised of long, mostly static sequences as beautiful as postcards. It is no surprise to learn that Geyrhalter was originally a photographer—the film recalls the epic, aestheticized images of posthuman modernity by Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky. Its sheer beauty defeats the film’s purpose. I was surprised during the Q&A to be reminded that the film had shown a narrative of rubbish and recycling, having been far more engaged by its formal organization, its arrangements of movement across the screen, its contrasts between stasis and movement, or sound and silence. What the film fails to tell us, and therefore cancels it as a moral protest, is the cost of its own globetrotting—what was the carbon footprint of Geyrhalter and his crew schlepping from Europe to Southeast Asia to America? 

Of course, there are in fact two International Styles—one aimed at festivals and critics, as represented by Geyrhalter, and the kind of “infotainment” that is picked up by streaming services, downloaded by millions, serves as a water-cooler talking point, and constitutes what most people mean by the term “documentary.” The form is that of an extended news report—celebrity reporter, an easily graspable issue, a set of charismatic subjects whose “personality” is squeezed into a pre-existent format; a bombardment of “factoids” that occlude real facts or progressive ideas that might actually change anything. This is what the North American mentor meant by “global.” It is just another form of cultural imperialism where the United States is the norm and center of the universe.

Laura Gabbert’s ideologically tone-deaf Food and Country (2023) may be the most offensively middle-class film I have ever seen, the cinematic equivalent of the lifestyle supplement of a Sunday newspaper. We are asked to sympathize with “small” business owners and celebrity chefs—each savvy social media promoters and profiled in the national press—as the U.S. food industry collapses during COVID. Cue crocodile tears about dumping food while other countries starve or having to let “our family” of workers go. There is a lot of talk about workers in the film, their rights, wages, and exploitation, but no actual interviews with them, even when one of the subjects opens a co-operative—their views may not have “gotten with the program.” A façade of multicultural liberalism—subjects are black, Asian, Middle Eastern, South American, Texan, etc.—only goes to prove that class will always speak to class, that class transcends boundaries of nation, culture, and race. The film centers on Ruth Reichl, who began life working in communes but came to national fame as a food critic, recommending restaurants to the superrich. Like the Silicon entrepreneur of a few decades ago, the “liberal,” “independent” capitalism of the modern foodie is being offered as the legacy of 1960s counterculture.  

One strand of the festival marked eighty years since the deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews to Auschwitz during the Nazi Occupation. It is here that the mentor’s disparagement of the “local” compared to the “global” might have some validity. Thessaloniki once had the largest Jewish population in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This demographic was reduced after the population exchanges following the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, when Greeks returning from Turkey began antisemitic campaigns to seize Jews’ jobs and civic status; it was decimated by the Holocaust, which was enacted in several sites around the city near where the festival’s cinemas are based. The Jewish cemetery was smashed and used for building materials, and controversially became the site for the new university. Shockingly, this shameful story is still barely known in Greece, which explains the basic, “year zero” quality of films like By-Standing and Standing-By (2012) and Kisses to the Children (2012), made for television or schools—didactic and mawkish, decent but artistically insignificant, with no reflection on the nature of Holocaust imagery or the filmmakers’ or viewers’ distance from the events discussed.  

This feebleness becomes especially apparent when such films are compared to a Holocaust film shown in another retrospective strand, The Art of Reality: Beyond Observation. Sergey Loznitsa’s Austerlitz (2016) exploits the tension inherent in the long take. Unless you’ve been primed beforehand or spotted the reference to W. G. Sebald’s 2001 Holocaust-themed novel Austerlitz, you might wonder what’s going on in the long opening scenes. Where are these crowds going—in T-shirts and shades, listening to headphones and audio guides, looking in a particular direction? Is it a sports match, a concert, or a festival? The first shot seems to show a sort of idyll, as people gather behind sunlit trees blowing in the breeze. It is only when we see the famous Arbeit Macht Frei sign that it dawns on us where we are. People take selfies and group photographs in front of the sign. This is Holocaust tourism, in excelsis. Why have they come? To tick off a list of modern “wonders of the world” to visit? Austerlitz shows us the obscene meaninglessness of the Holocaust presented without context or true engagement. The concentration camp becomes just one more historical site where bad things happened and which we now visit.

That first shot, with tourists blocked by trees, will inform later shots outside huts and inside corridors, their perfect symmetry as figures weave in and out as if choreographed rhythmically, standing against the now absent, asymmetrical horrors perpetrated within. Austerlitz is like a nonfiction first draft for Loznitsa’s later Donbass (2018), with its Ukraine-as-theme-park dystopia. Later sequences outside the huts show competing tour guides, with one isolated on the soundtrack as he explains why prisoners were taken to this camp, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg for political prisoners. Is Loznitsa here finally conceding to the audience, providing a narrator in this film without a narrator? Or is it the kind of rote patter that all tour guides use, regardless of site? Is the general indifference of the tourists actually a “good” thing—like the roots growing through the rails in Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), a decade after the liberations of the camps, is it is a sign that life goes on? Certainly, Austerlitz seems to propose that it is not work but tourism that sets you free. Loznitsa turns the International Style (festival version) against itself, and shows that its distanced, uncontextualized approach serves to homogenize horror and trauma. He implicitly concedes that if we want to learn about the Holocaust, we need to go to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (also shown at Thessaloniki) or Primo Levi—anywhere but his Austerlitz. It is to be hoped that when Greek filmmakers inevitably turn their cameras on the recent rail tragedy, it will be with the hard critical edge of a Loznitsa, and not the comforting clichés of prime-time television. 

For more information on the Thessaloniki Film Festival, visit here.

Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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