The opening shot in Jason Raftopoulos’s, Voices in Deep is the shimmering rays of the sun dancing on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea seen from below the surface. We follow the dark hull of a small fishing boat as it moves on the surface. Only it’s not of Greek fishers; the rickety boat is laden with refugees from the catastrophic Syrian Civil War and ISIS, 2015.
The Aegean in Voices in Deep is foreboding– where ancient and new wars meld – a sea seeded by the corpses of millions over the millennia. Raftopoulos’s second feature film is not always easy to watch – the director says he was “compelled to go there”.
A palimpsest of crises
The film is set in the shadow of Greece’s 2015 refugee crisis and centres around two orphaned refugees, brothers Tarek and Zaeed. They have no money or access to work; they sleep on a single bed the older brother pays for by selling his body to middle-aged men. by working for an abusive pimp, Masi. When a local refugee girl is found murdered, Zaeed, the younger brother, is determined to escape their grim reality—no matter the cost.
Bobby, who once dedicated her life to aiding refugees, is spiralling. “She is trapped in her hell, but she is desperate to get out and make her way back to Australia,” Raftopoulos says. However, when her buyer disappears, she faces the pressure of offloading the spoiling goods. As her stress builds, Bobby begins exhibiting erratic behaviour, flashing strangers—a raw, involuntary response to her post-traumatic anguish.
Haunted by the trauma of a tragic sinking, she is now holed up in a dingy motel room, emotionally paralysed. She turns to the black market, attempting to sell illegally harvested shellfish before catching a flight back to Australia.
“The film is a response to feeling powerless against massive events and how we are connected by the idea that we know, as we’re watching snippets on TV, and we’re getting sound bites on social media – then we just flick over to the next thing.”
The 2015 Syrian refugee crisis saw almost one million refugees braving the Mediterranean to make landfall on Greece’s rocky islands. Many washed ashore as corpses; those that were alive, barely—women, children, families with life jackets, dehydrated, hungry, and confused—landed on Greece’s sparkling beaches while tourists sunned themselves and drank cold beers or cocktails.
Interconnected traumas: Shared humanity
In what is in the film an unsettled urban landscape of Athens, Greece, gripped by the trauma of a collapsed economy. Paths cross, and survival becomes a fragile thread, tested by the weight of desperation, guilt, and the distant hope for a better life.
“The stories speak to this idea that when you’re a transient, an outsider, you will always face barriers. I’ve seen that with my parents and grandparents.”
That’s the philosophical basis of Raftopoulos’s film, in fact, of much art. But the story is also an intense, detailed, everyday life of two Syrian refugee brothers, one forced to sell his body, and an Australian refugee volunteer in Athens.
“The point about these two separate journeys,” the Syrian brothers and the Australian refugee advocate living in Greece, says Raftopoulos, is “about the aftermath. It’s about asking, ‘How do you keep moving in the aftermath of these kinds of massive events?’
“How do you deal with that kind of trauma when you have no place to put it right?” he asks. For the director, it becomes a “fight between someone going through a spiritual crisis and someone going through a physical crisis.” He also wants to show audiences that, however distant events may be, “we are all interconnected by personal traumas.”
Athens beyond the Instagram post
Raftopoulos takes the impact of great events into inner urban Athens, away from the gleaming sunlight and cobbled streets of cafés. It’s the other Athens, of immigrants and refugees, living invisible lives in inner-city suburbs once middle-class, now abandoned to them and in decay.
Raftopoulos steers away from “clichés and conventions of how we perceive Athens.”
“I wanted to see Athens with new eyes – the best compliment I got from an Athenian was that they hadn’t seen Athens shot like that before.”
“I like to record life and wanted the film to feel timeless, to be in the present, in the aftermath of the refugee crisis – a ocial realist film.”
The consistent Janus-like cultural schizophrenia of looking East and West which led to many wars, is also the bridge between these Syrians and Greeks—their misery reminds Greeks who they are.
“This new Athens is the melting pot for this kind of trauma and has been so for thousands of years.
“The place became central to the story because the place has been through much – wars, civil wars, famines, foreign occupations, economic crises, dictatorships – thousands of years in this tiny city at the crossroads of East and West.
“The whole thing is trauma upon trauma,” Raftopoulos says.
In Australia, we overlook refugees, and boat people landing 3,400 kilometres away from Melbourne or Sydney. Offshore processing has also made them completely distant and invisible; it’s organised, we’re organised. In Greece, bodies floated on the shore; suddenly there were 1,000,000 refugees – most living in the shadowlands of Athens.
“At the end of the day, our parents and our grandparents were economic refugees. That was my way into it, our story.”
Voices in Deep looks at xenophobia, and the deeper realisation that a collapsed Greece became, again, the foreigner to the European West.
“I tried to put as many different shades as possible, like the refugee councillor woman. I tried to show those facets of Greece.”
Authenticity at the core
Voices in Deep is authentic and the cast, Hannah Sims, Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Karavevas, Kostas Nikouli, and Michael Hilane, live their characters.
The film uses Greek, English and Arabic and pays homage to American filmmaker John Cassavetes’s slice-of-life realism – handheld camera, and complex characters unravelling due to internal and external forces.
“Cassavetes has always been a hero of independent filmmakers; it’s the ethos of ‘I’ve got a camera and I’ve got the will and I want to go.’
“You couldn’t think of Scorsese or Coppola without Cassavetes somewhere at the root of it.”
Voices in Deep secured the producer’s offset from Screen Australia, Hellenic Film Commission, and it is the first Greek Australian film to receive the Greek Government location offset rebate.
“I would love to work more in Greece, and the Greek producers were asking for a Greek co-production treaty with Australia – they’ve been crying for years.”
Greece has co-production treaties with France, England, and Canada, in what is fast becoming a booming film renaissance in Greece.
Voices in Deep is out on limited release, and Raftopoulos has secured deals with Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. He wants to see it on SBS On Demand and various streaming services. He sees “audiences of Voices in Deep as cinephiles who will discover the work over time”.
Voices in Deep was selected for the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and it will no doubt garner many more acolytes.
Voices in Deep has a limited screening in Melbourne, on Saturday, November 23 at 4 pm followed by a Q and A and there is a screening Tuesday 26 at 6:10 pm at the Thornbury Picture House.
