The Balkan blues on screen at Greek film festival

Created in 1994 as part of the Greek festival — whose 58th edition ends on Sunday — “Look at the Balkans” features 15 films from the surrounding region.

As the former Yugoslavia was splitting up, festival organisers initially wanted to break the media portrayal of the region as a “powder keg”, and fight against the long-standing prejudices held in neighbouring Greece, curator Dimitris Kerkinos told AFP.

Since then, local productions have won international acclaim, driven largely by the success of the new cinema powerhouses of the region: Romania and Turkey.

But darkness and humour — in the form of politeness of despair — continue to prevail, according to Kerkinos, in reaction to the prevailing “disillusion” in the face of “a transition that does not end”.

“Democracy had to happen and change everything, but for 20 years little has changed, corruption remains and development does not come,” he said.

– ‘Depression as legacy’ –

Under these conditions, even committing suicide becomes a challenge, said Serbian director Bojan Vuletic, whose “Requiem for Mrs. J” portrays depression “as the only common legacy left to this corner of the planet by the passage from communism to capitalism”.

Although on a more jubilant note, suicide is still a theme for Macedonian director Gjorce Stavreski’s “Secret Ingredient”, which had its world premiere in Thessaloniki.

To relieve his cancer-suffering and suicidal father, the broke protagonist Vele, ends up stuffing a cake with cannabis because he has no money for medicine.

The treatment works, but he still needs to escape the mafia — from whom he stole the drugs — and from the crowds of sick neighbours who bang on his door believing him to be a miracle healer.

“It’s as if Vele is trying to swim while his feet are caught in a fishing net… it’s a good metaphor for life in the Balkans,” the director told AFP.

For the filmmaker, Balkan cinema exposes the “cowboy capitalism” operating in the region while serving as a warning to the rest of Europe “which is heading in the same direction”.

– Turkish censorship and exile –

The situation is worse still in Turkey, where filmmakers have become “targets” of the government as it becomes more authoritarian, said Kazim Oz.

This year’s festival includes the director’s identity road-movie “Zer”, set in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish south-east.

Many have left Turkey, which Kerkinos the curator believes doesn’t bode well for future productions, but Oz chose to stay.

His film about the killing of thousands of Kurds in Dersim (eastern Turkey) in 1937, was partially censored when it was released at the Istanbul Film Festival, and has often come up against locked doors.

As in Greece, where the financial crisis has brought out a radical new wave now embodied by the multi-award-winning Yorgos Lanthimos, the depression does not prevent Balkan cinematography from renewing and diversifying, said Kerkinos.

Gjorce Stavreski did not want to “tinker with a little Balkan movie” or a more folklore “farce” — he wanted to play the game of the “process of European production” to “go beyond the borders”.

“Look at the Balkans” offers a broad cinematic range, from the analysis of a couple in the Romanian “Ana, my love”, to an intimate family story in “3/4” from Bulgaria, and the dystopian Turkish fable “Grain”.

Many are long-unimaginable regional co-productions, Kerkinos said, such as “Secret ingredient”, which was co-produced by Macedonia and Greece, despite the two countries having still not managed to settle since 1991 the dispute over the name “Macedonia”.