The personal is fiercely political in director Fil Ieropoulos’s refreshingly bold Avant-Drag!, a documentary group portrait of ten provocative, gender-exploding artists from Greece’s queer underground. Subtitled “radical performers re-imagine Athens,” this lightly experimental essay-film has a manifesto-like tone and a grungy DIY aesthetic, self-consciously referencing the punky LGBTQ+ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.
The episodic structure of Avant-Drag! becomes repetitive in places, and much of the film is too light on background context. But overall, Ieropoulos delivers an appealing fusion of aesthetics and polemics. With drag queens now a mainstream TV phenomenon, alongside ongoing worldwide struggles for gay and trans rights, this hard-hitting queer-pride statement should generate healthy audience appeal. Currently on a prize-winning festival run, it screens in Sarajevo this week.
Avant-Drag! is a sobering reminder that drag was not always wholesome family entrainment but an edgy, marginalised subculture often born form trauma, rejection and violence. In socially and religious conservative nations like Greece, stepping outside gender norms is still brave and often dangerous. One notorious case referred to throughout the film is the killing of Zacharias “Zackie Oh” Kostopoulos in 2018. A friend of the director and several others on this project, Kostopoulos was brutally beaten in broad daylight on an Athens street by two men, one belonging to a far-right political party, then beaten again by two police officers. He died on his way to hospital. Although the killers were eventually jailed, the police were exonerated.
Despite these darker elements, Avant-Drag! is mostly a defiantly celebratory, visually vivacious film. It mainly consists of concise artist profiles that blend conventional interview material with short performance pieces shot on vintage-looking video. Each chapter is loosely linked by poetic chunks of narration, voiced by actress Marisha Triantafyllidou. “The city is a battlefield,” she softly sighs. “Our stories were not written in some Bible… they were written in glitter on sidewalks, trash and sewers.”
The oldest case study featured here is Kangela Tromokratisch, a middle-aged “riot housewife” who modelled her garish, surreal look on her hero, Australian fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery. Following a traumatic childhood, Kangela says her drag alter ego is “a much more complete version of myself.” Another visually striking act is the male-female duo, Parakatyanova and SerGay Parakatyanov, who combine opera and drag in a witty parody of traditional gender roles. Their fabulous, outandish costumes are, they claim, “mirrors that show the ridiculousness of our enemies.”
In Ieropoulos’ conception, drag is clearly a broad church, and indeed a sacrilegious one. Several featured performers steal and subvert religious imagery, clothing and symbols to attack the conservative, sexist, homophobic culture of the Greek Orthodox faith. One of the bravest is drag king El Libido, who dresses as a dominatrix nun, handing out pro-abortion leaflets to unsuspecting motorists and inserting candles into her, ahem, inner sanctum.
A shared anger towards nationalism, fascism and anti-immigrant rhetoric also unites this politically engaged group. A brash, blonde-wigged, chain-smoking “turbo-folk” diva calling herself Aurora Poala Maredo is one of film’s most amusing self-made creations, exaggerating her Albanian heritage to critique the “Hellenisation” of migrants from Greece’s northerly neighbour, who are imported as cheap labour but routinely face racism. “Ethnicity is a terrible performance,” Aurora explains as she stops traffic with her plate-smashing antics in downtown Athens, like a walking PhD thesis in Intersectional Queer Theory.
Avant-Drag! culminates in a dinner party bringing together all the performers, who share a lively discussion about fear and shame, cancel culture, pink-washing, HIV survivor’s guilt, the meagre financial rewards of experimental art, and more. These juicy debates deserve more screen time than the soundbites they get here. A more journalistically rigorous director might also have probed more deeply into what unites and divides this disparate group.
Even so, the film’s take-home message is compassionate and cautiously hopeful, as warm smiles for the camera harden into intense stares while Beethoven’s Ode To Joy swells on the soundtrack, a slightly sinister coda which feels like a winking homage to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). “We are the light after the darkness,” Triantafyllidou intones in voice-over, “we are more than real, we are the truth.” This is pure poetic pretension, of course. But on its own terms, wise and beautiful too.
Director, editing: Fil Ieropoulos
Cast: Kangela Tromokratisch, Er Libido, Aurora Paola Morado, Parakatyanova, SerGay Parakatyanov, McMorait, Cotsos, Lala Kolopi, Veronique Tromokratisch, Cruella Tromokratisch, Marisha Triantafyllidou
Cinematography: Mihalis Gkatzogias
Texts: Foivos Dousos
Music: Lykourgos Porfyris
Producers: Foivos Dousos, Sebastian Strakowicz, Spyros Patsouras
Production company, world sales: FYTA (Greece)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Human Rights Day)
In Greek
92 minutes
