“It was a pretty disgusting series of events… it was tragic. Greece’s foreign minister – who was George Papandreou at the time – basically wanted the bus out of the country and to let the Albanians kill them. It shows the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Greek state.”

“What was I thinking…?’ starts Constantine Giannaris when I ask him about the origins of his quintessential film From The Edge of the City.
He begins by telling me about the landscape that surrounded him in the late ’90s. Giannaris was travelling back and forth from London to Athens, and what he was seeing was an issue no one would dare approach, yet was so obvious and unavoidable for every Athenian – migration.
“I knew it; I felt it in my bones that this would become the next agenda for Greece, for the next 20 or so years – and it’s happened,” says the filmmaker, on the impact immigration has had on the political climate of Greece.
“No one was dealing with the urban experience and for me this is what was fascinating,” he tells Neos Kosmos.
The filmmaker met a group of young men from Menidi (a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Athens) and he says they opened him up to this new urban terrain, a whole urban setting, one where everyone spoke Russian. At first, he thought of documenting this but was told by his producer to opt for a feature film instead. Giannaris had the idea of a film in his head and it took him only two weeks to write the screenplay for From The Edge of the City.
In this movie, he wanted to escape from the queer politics that had surrounded his primary stages of filmmaking, but not avoid them completely. This film manages to allow queer politics, sexuality and notions of the body to work hand-in-hand with issues such as politics, ethnicity and migration.
“I don’t think anyone thinks when they make a film,” he asserts, “I think one just thinks of how to make a film without putting it in a wider context.”
Yet Giannaris was thinking about one thing when making this film. A deliberate attempt to steer away from Greek films of the time. Tired of Greek cinema of the time that seemed to be “obsessive in its pursuit of the past, of history, of the left”, he made it his mission to show what was really going on in modern day Greece through the camera’s gaze.
Making a movie about migration came naturally to this filmmaker. Born in Sydney, Giannaris’ family – who migrated to Australia from Sparti, Peloponnese – had made several attempts to move back to Greece. Yet, he says there is a vast difference to his experience as a migrant, to that of one in Greece.
“I can’t compare the experience I had to that of an immigrant in Greece,” he says. In Australia he says, immigrants have rights to citizenship and nationality, in Greece however, he says it’s bogged down and “reactionary to notions of blood and soil”.
“The experience of otherness; the experience of being on the outside, is what marked me growing up in Australia. That sense of being bilingual and the way other Australians perceive you.”
The last time the filmmaker left Australian soil, he had just been expelled from his first year in high school.
“We occupied the school,” he said as his reason for the expulsion. “Why?” I asked.
“I remember it being about discipline… our hair was too long… Afta.”
His time living in Greece was a contradiction. On one hand, he says, he was fortunate to go to a great bilingual school in Athens, visit the islands, and have the freedom that was at times given to him in the village. Yet all the while, he was faced with an oppression of sexuality.
“The level of personal freedom was curtailed and led one to be more reactive towards the environment; it was tough, but it was beautiful all the same,” he says.
But Greece provided him with another avenue to express himself in his adolescent years – it gave him film. Three to four times a week he would go to the cinema as a staple. He was drawn to film.
Giannaris attended university in Birmingham, UK, to study history and economics, continuing with a Post Grad in Russian Greek relations. Whilst there, he came in contact with world cinema through university film clubs and societies. This was a time before DVD, before digital technology – everything was analogue. But with the support of the British Film Institute, a young Giannaris was exposed to some exceptional works. At the same time, his interest in becoming an academic was waning. He packed up and took himself to London and got involved in the art scene, purely by accident. And, as he was always drawn to film, the experimenting began.
At the time, Channel Four was just getting legs, and there were opportunities for young filmmakers to be involved. So he started creating experimental, super 8, low (if any) budget documentaries heavily influenced by what was going on in the ’80s with the AIDS epidemic.
“When you see your friends falling ill and dying, there’s an existential need to capture it on film,” he explains. He soon started getting recognised by International Film Festivals such as Berlin, with his documentary Framed Youth – about gay and lesbian youth in the ’80s – a standout in that era.
It was when the filmmaker chose to use Cavafy’s poetry to portray and understand what was happening to his friends with AIDS that he was recognised in Greece – even more so this year. His lyrical documentary Trojans was shot twenty years ago, and even though the Greek film industry knew about it, it wasn’t until this year – with Cavafy’s 150th anniversary – that they really took notice.
“Suddenly, I’m getting all these phone calls from Greece for Trojans – everyone wants to screen it!” he says with a laugh from his home in Athens.
Yet, whilst his movie Trojans is gaining a resurgence in the Hellenic Republic, his 2005 movie Hostage polarised and, in some cases, turned Greeks against this filmmaker.
“It was the first time I remember neo-Nazi members, Golden Dawn; it was a time when they were still a completely marginal and non-existent force,” he says. Members gathered outside central cinemas in Greece to protest the screening of Hostage. There were bomb threats in some cinemas. Even though the film received a good international career, it was quickly taken off theatrical release in Greece.
Based on a real life event of a hostage, the film centres around a young Albanian immigrant who boards an intercity bus on its daily route to northern Greece. Pulling out a gun and a grenade, he allows most of the passengers to leave, but he keeps seven of them hostage, demanding a ransom and safe passage back to his country.
Giannaris says Greeks perceived that he was in favour of “Albania-ism, which was a misreading of the film”. He says the film shows a darker underbelly of what was going on in Greece. The exploitation of small villages, male rape, the Stockholm Syndrome on the bus, “Greeks don’t come out looking so fantastic”.
“It was a pretty disgusting series of events – the media circus, the state shown to be completely incapable… it was tragic. Greece’s foreign minister – who was George Papandreou at the time- basically wanted the bus out of the country and to let the Albanians kill them.
“It shows the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Greek state.”
But this wasn’t the filmmakers driving force; he was more interested in the human perspective, what the people on the bus felt. He went about interviewing the people on the bus – focusing on the women – to gauge their perspective of the situation. One woman spoke of her revulsion to her captor based on his sweat and his overpowering hormonal smell. Another woman, he says, was clearly in love with him but in denial – a true case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Then there is the issue of male rape in the film, and how it’s perceived to be worse than the rape of a female. And how the hijacker avenges himself like “a dark ancient figure which only leads to his death”, says Giannaris, because “there is nothing more stupid than taking a bus by gunpoint”.
“It’s a suicide mission really.”
Two of Giannaris films have been selected for the Best of Program of this year’s Greek Film Festival. His 1998 film From The Edge of the City, and the 2001 drama One Day in August.
“One Day in August is much more of a Greek film,” he says, adding that women get this film more than men, “and I think From The Edge of the City translates well for a non-Greek audience, and gay audiences. And a younger Greek crowd would get it more,” he says on how his films stand in the program.
I become conscious of the time. It may be morning in Melbourne, but it’s way past midnight in Athens. Giannaris doesn’t seem to mind.
“I’m writing a book called South about Athens in the last four to five years,” he says about what’s coming up for him. “And I am writing various scripts.”
When asked when these scripts will come to fruition as films, there’s a pause and a slight laugh.
“I’m waiting to see if the Germans are going to put any money into it – like the rest of the country.”
Constantine Giannaris’ films From The Edge of the City and One Day in August are screening as part of the Delphi Bank 20th Greek Film Festival. For tickets and film screenings visit www.greekfilmfestival.com