The 26th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

This March, as usual, banners, posters, flyers, tote bags, and TV idents promoted the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival across the city. The festival’s “visual identity” each year tends to be cute or whimsical, or focus on an urgent political issue, such as the refugee crisis. This year, the image depicted two naked men in an embrace, based on a sketch by Dimitris Papaionnou. The sketch directly referred to the festival’s tribute to multimedia artist Papaionnou, which took place in both conventional cinemas and a branch of the Museum of Modern Art, which exhibited a six-hour recording of his looping performance piece INSIDE (2011). It also pointed to the film’s main retrospective strand Citizen Queer, which included screenings of canonical films such as The Queen (1968) and The Celluloid Closet (1995), with newer and rare local works, was accompanied by sidebar events, and was commemorated by one of the festival’s distinctive “Non Catalog” publications, featuring texts by leading Greek or Greek-based LGBTQI+ filmmakers, writers, academics, and curators. And a second retrospective strand, dedicated to Panayotis Evangelidis, queer Greek filmmaker, writer, and translator of Yukio Mishima, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and David Mamet. More broadly, the image referred to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Greece the previous month—a move that infuriated the Orthodox Church and the far right—and looked forward to June, when Thessaloniki hosts EuroPride, the continent’s largest celebration of the LGBTQI+ community in a Europe that includes many states actively hostile to it.

On Saturday March 9, three days into the festival, on Aristotelous Square—the city center of Thessaloniki, where the festival’s flagship Olympion Cinema and main hotel for festival guests, the Electra Palace, are located—a mob of two hundred attacked two trans people in broad daylight with abuse, threats, and bottles. When the police eventually came to the restaurant where the pair took refuge, the officers mocked them and forced them to confront the jeering mob. The police also refused to accept any of the cell phone recordings made by some of the witnesses. The attack came months after the murder of Anna Ivankova—a Black transgender woman who, ironically, had fled her homeland of Cuba because of anti-trans discrimination—the latest in a series of homicidal attacks on and popular denigration of the queer community in Greece.

The Thessaloniki attack obviously cast a pall over the festival. At the Thursday March 14 screening of Graham Kolbeins’s Queer Japan (2019), the usual director intro was replaced by an impromptu, highly charged forty-minute forum wherein two witnesses (including an employee of the restaurant of refuge) gave their testimonies. They outlined the widespread transphobia, homophobia, and racism in the country, and reported that one of the assaulted had been subsequently attacked again outside a grocery shop.

Greece has recently experienced a wave of protests against runaway inflation, the privatization of public services, and—as elsewhere in Europe—migration. So, the attack was probably in part populist scapegoating. The haters were out in force later in the week on Tuesday, disrupting the first screening of Elina Psykou’s Stray Bodies. I didn’t know any of this when on Thursday afternoon I went to the Port of Thessaloniki, where the festival is based, to attend the second screening, and was alarmed to find the gates closed. There were police everywhere, including several in a van putting on riot gear. The cinema was blocked off by a line of police. Staff responded to queries with “Everything’s Okay.” Everything was clearly not Okay.

What was it about Stray Bodies that got God-fearing Greeks into such a tizz? It is a film about people’s rights over their bodies—women’s rights in particular, but not exclusively. Subjects include abortion, IVF, and assisted suicide. Stray Bodies is a playful film clearly influenced by Agnès Varda (herself of Greek heritage). It references both her proabortion musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (in Stray Bodies, a young Maltese woman, about to have an abortion in Sicily because it is illegal in her deeply Catholic country, lip-syncs and gyrates to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” across the tourist sites of Valletta) and her feminist and autobiographical essay films. 

I suspect that what has really angered people was the film’s climax, which takes Stray Bodies into areas not even Varda dared to go. An assisted suicide is documented in one unbroken, static, exquisitely composed take. This “snuff movie” sequence is followed by a jubilant montage again reminiscent of One Sings, celebrating birth, life, and death. One of the contributors points out that the E.U., like the U.S., is a federation of states, each with their own “stray” laws on legislating bodies, some more illiberal than others. Stray Bodies is essentially a didactic plea for more parity in legislation across the bloc. But that death sequence takes it way beyond didacticism into something deeply and properly discomfiting. 

As if in subterranean reaction to all this feminism and diversity, there was a surprising upsurge in films about the Great White Male Artist (GWMA), from Jean-Luc Godard to Paul Simon. These films generally celebrated mastery—over materials and obstacles. A typical example, all swooping drone shots and sweeping score, was Among the Wolves, wherein the year-long project of photographer (and co-director) Olivier Larrey and painter Yves Fagniart to depict wolves on the Russo-Finnish Sami border was treated like a military campaign. This venerable, hagiographic approach had been marvelously guyed in 2012 in The Life and Death of Celso Junior, screening as part of the Evangelidis retrospective. Where most of the artists in GWMA films expound high-mindedly about Rembrandt, Dylan, or “the light,” Celso speaks with the same fluency and passion about the leather boots and Spaghetti Westerns that inform his paintings and videos, which are a joyous cross between Leon Golub and Tom of Finland.

Barbet Schroeder’s Ricardo and Painting belongs to the GWMA subgenre, and displays most of its traits, yet it manages to be a thing of wonder. Whether in fiction or documentary, Schroeder’s subjects are characterised by antisocial extremes—drug addicts, sadomasochists, murderers, cannibalistic dictators, or psychopathic roommates. There appears to be nothing extreme or antisocial about Argentine painter Ricardo Cavallo, who fled the junta to France in 1976. Small, handsome, enthusiastic, cultured, and gregarious, he is the model documentary subject, always at the director’s disposal, providing good food along the way. Much of the film is structured around friendship—Cavalli’s with Schroeder most evidently, as the latter continually enters the frame to engage with this most engaging man, but also with his patrons, friends, and several of the young boys he teaches in his art school for children. It is a world of male camaraderie, certainly, with barely a female in sight, although cinematographer Victoria Clay-Mendoza is shown keeping a quiet eye on everything, while an offhand mention of Ricardo’s friend Anna opens up an entire world not shown on screen. This male bias extends to the lengthy discussion of his (all-male) “masters,” such as Velazquez and Cezanne.

Where Ricardo is extreme is in his extreme devotion to his art—when he is not painting, he is thinking and talking about it, and sees the world entirely in relation to its translatability into pictures. A repeated motif shows the sprightly sexagenarian clambering over bulbous Breton boulders to reach a cave he is painting, followed by the taller but less mobile Schroeder, laboring behind him with ski sticks. Schroeder doesn’t have to play catch-up in the film itself, however, and for all its congeniality, it is a profound disquisition on the relationship between film and painting, an update of the ancient quarrel between painting and sculpture about which was the more lifelike. But will the film interest those with no interest in art? As a study of creativity, masculinity, exile, France, and, yes, “the light,” I would say—most definitely.

Barely twenty people attended the screening of Taboo: Amos Guttman, presumably because it is an Israeli film about an Israeli subject made using funds from Israeli government agencies. Even before the current bloodbath in Gaza, activists have attempted to prevent Israel from participating in any kind of “whitewashing” cultural event (at the time of writing, there are currently protests against Israel’s participation in May’s Eurovision Song Contest). If this was the reason for the sparse attendance, it was a shortsighted one. Pioneering queer director Amos Guttmann (1954-93) was one of the few Israeli artists brave enough to directly confront, ridicule, and subvert the shibboleths of Israeli nationalism, militarism, settler colonialism, and apartheid. Born in Hungary to a survivor of Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz medical experiments, Guttmann was both revered and reviled in his lifetime as the first openly gay Israeli filmmaker to depict gay Israeli life. His first feature Drifting was released during the 1982 Lebanon War amid a slew of macho patriotic films. Guttmann’s frank and explicit focus on gay desire—a desire that encompassed Arab men, thereby humanizing them when they were dehumanized throughout Israel—was not universally welcomed. 

Allying himself to the queer cine-family of Visconti, Pasolini, and Fassbinder, Guttmann shared with the latter two a desire to provoke and insult the ruling classes in both his work and public fora. His next film Bar 51 (1986) was a tale of incest in which the heroine is provocatively named after Guttman’s sister. The unexpected popular and critical success of this film led to Guttman tackling and queering the genre he hated most, the Israeli war film, with Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1987). He never recovered from its critical mauling and box-office failure. This was compounded by the state-sanctioned homophobia that obtained in Israel as elsewhere in reaction to AIDS. Guttman’s last feature Amazing Grace (1992) was a weepie that explored his own contraction of the illness. Guttman’s passionate focus on queer life was not a simplistic, affirmative one, and—like Fassbinder before him—his work was often attacked by gay activists who rejected its dark and self-loathing depictions. 

Structurally and emotionally important to Taboo is the use made of an interview with Guttman in the weeks before his AIDS-related death. The durability of Guttman’s insolence, humor, and anger is reflected in his immaculate appearance, at once rejecting and confronting the illness ravaging his body. The climactic sequence showing Guttman at the end of the interview, closing his eyes as he lies down, is so moving, with its conflation of present and past, presence and absence, that Taboo should have ended there. It doesn’t. Director Shauly Melamed concludes by using AI to have Guttman “read” from his script for a never-realised adaptation of Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (whose Querelle was adapted for Fassbinder’s last film). Melamed doesn’t own up to this deception until the film’s credits—he solicits an emotional response from viewers by an act of bad faith and hopes they don’t notice. 

If documentary as a genre is fatally linked to journalism, occasionally it can rise to poetry. Sarah del Pino’s Chrysotile is a film without orienting voice-over, captions, or expert witnesses. For the first ten minutes, there is no dialogue, and the viewer is left to his or her own devices. This puts you on the alert—awake to mystery, wonder, revelation. Which is a weird way to describe a film about asbestos, the mineral used for over a century in building materials before it was found to cause cancer and other lung conditions (chrysotile, or white asbestos, is the most used form of the mineral). Del Pino creates a kind of science-fiction documentary in the manner of Herzog or Chris Marker, or the Surrealists before them—filmmakers who made our strange world strange again. Claustrophobic 2001-like shots of men in hazmat suits dismantling asbestos panels in an insulated corridor, watched by their foreman through a Perspex window, gives way to a sun-filled Mediterranean landscape. The change is only momentarily liberating because another hazmat-clad worker emerges from his jeep next to gaping holes and terraces in the rocky landscapes where asbestos was once quarried. He takes soundings as if he were in Chernobyl or Fukushima, not the South of France. Some of his samples, with their bird-like, feathery surface, are taken to a lab. In another of the film’s many visual surprises, del Pino takes us into the asbestos itself through imagery that recalls the optical art and liquid crystals of the late 1960s. The smelting center that is the film’s main location stands out against the countryside, glowing ominously in the dark as if itself contaminated. 

This is poetry because every shot is shorn of cliché, and each object emerges as if in relief. The fixed camera gives weight to movement within the frame, but never becomes a dogma, changing scale and length, or moving when necessary. The lack of verbal formulae means that when there is talking, it has an uncanny force. Take the climactic sequence, lasting about ten minutes, which focuses on four former employees of the asbestos company, dying from the materials they handled for decades, and having lost family and friends to the resultant diseases. They stand in a hunters’ viewing lodge, queasily lit from behind, and look out at the open mine where they worked, once a “lunar” landscape in the Med, now mostly reclaimed by nature. They speak of their experiences calmly. The sequence is devastating—as is the whole of this remarkable film, its one hour running time comprising an entire universe, microscopically and macroscopically. The best documentaries create their own moulds, then break them.

For further information on the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, visit here.

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

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3