Tragic events ripple across a small community on the border between Greece and North Macedonia in writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s bleakly compelling debut feature, Behind The Haystacks.
Grounded in gutsy performances and downbeat social realism, this solemn ensemble drama takes place in 2015, when large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn nations began surging through the “Balkan corridor” towards western Europe. But while it opens like a familiar migration-themed narrative, this Greek-Macedonian-German co-production soon shifts gear into a more timeless personal story about three members of the same family, each trapped by secrets and lies, stifling social conventions and dubious ethical choices.
Proedrou initially keeps tension on a low flame, but plants a suspenseful hook early with her prologue, in which a group of children stumble across a pair of dead bodies at the edge of Lake Doiran on Greece’s northern border. She then unravels the backstory to this macabre discovery across three overlapping chapters, a Rashomon-style splintering of subjective viewpoints that gradually come together into a cohesive jigsaw narrative. Within its modest family framework, Behind The Haystacks makes some deeper state-of-the-nation points about injustice, hypocrisy and racism. World premiering this week at Thessaloniki International Film Festival, this contemporary Greek tragedy is a classic festival feature in theme and style, with a moral heft and novelistic texture that could give it wider art-house appeal and awards potential.
The opening act revolves around Stergios (Stathis Stamoulakatos), a grizzled veteran fisherman carrying a heavy burden of guilt for past crimes and misdemeanours, notably an impending court case for historic tax fraud. Offered the opportunity pay down his debts in a desperate bid to avoid jail time, he strikes a Faustian deal with an illegal people-smuggling gang, who are bringing refugees from war-torn Syria across the nearby Macedonian border by boat. The second chapter turns its focus on Stergios’ wife Maria (Lena Ouzounidou), a devoutly religious woman active in the Greek Orthodox church, who is drawn into charitable work at a nearby refugee camp even though her haughty priest strictly forbids the “sinful” activity of helping Muslims.
A combustible background presence in these opening sections is the couple’s twenty-something daughter Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda), a free-spirited nurse and aspiring singer who is constantly clashing with her controlling, socially conservative father. She takes centre stage in the third act, which helps tie together the loose ends and unresolved questions of the story so far. Using extra shifts at the hospital as cover, Anastasia has been leading a double life of secret boyfriends, boozy parties and stage performances in sleazy nightclubs. When Stergios stumbles across the truth, their overheated arguments take a tragic turn.
There is precious little mercy or redemption in Behind The Haystacks. Innocents die, the wrong people are scapegoated, the guilty walk free, and nobody gets away with a clean conscience. These characters are seemingly stuck in a purgatory of their own making, with scant chance of escape. Which makes for a heavy-going but generally gripping drama, largely thanks to deft direction and convincingly raw performances.
Proedrou juggles multi-character complexity and non-linear narratives with impressive dexterity for such an inexperienced novice, though she sometimes gets a little swamped by stylistic overreach, jump-cutting across across different seasons and timelines in confusing manner. A washed-out, wintry colour scheme mirrors the story’s muddy moral tone while a spartan soundtrack of Balkan folk music, knotty tangles of mournful drones and piercing microtonal yodels, reinforces this funereal mood of flinty fatalism.
Director, screenwriter: Asimina Proedrou
Cast: Stathis Stamoulakatos, Lena Ouzounidou, Evgenia Lavda, Christos Kontogeorgis, Dina Mihailidou, Paschalis Tsarouhas
Cinematography: Simos Sarketzis
Editing: Elektra Venaki
Music: Marios Strofalis
Producers: Ioanna Bolomyti, Markus Halberschmidt, Vladimir Anastasov, Angela Nestorovska
Production companies: Argonauts Productions (Greece), Fiction Park (Germany), Sektor Film (Macedonia)
World sales: Argonauts Productions
Venue: Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Meet The Neighbors)
In Greek, Macedonian
118 minutes
