An anguished Athenian matriarch goes in search of her missing adult son, and gets way more than she bargained for, in the charming comic fake-umentary Black Stone. Newly festooned with multiple prizes following its world premiere at Thessaloniki International Film Festival last week, this modestly scaled but deftly handled debut feature from Greek-British writer-director Spiros Jacovides feels like that rare cinematic confection, a culturally specific comedy that could travel widely without losing too much in translation. More festival bookings are assured, with potential for word-of-mouth crossover success and perhaps even an English-language remake.
The conceit of Black Stone is that the film crew are making a documentary about the roughly 49,000 “ghosts” employed by the Greek civil service, officially registered government workers who appear to be permanently absent from their posts. This preposterous premise may sound like a contemporary spin on Gogol’s classic satirical novel Dead Souls, but it is reportedly rooted in contemporary reality. Jacovides opens with a montage of empty desks, endlessly ringing phones and baffled co-workers, setting up a deadpan tone that owes more to the bittersweet absurdism of Nordic directors like Aki Kaurismäki than to the biting surrealism that has shaped recent Greek cinema.
The narrative focus then narrows to one of these mysterious phantoms, Panos Dologlou (Achilleas Chariskos), who has gone missing from his job at a government employment and welfare agency. The film-makers become regular guests in the missing man’s family apartment, forging a close bond with his mother Haroula (scene-stealing Eleni Kokkidou, a well-regarded TV sitcom veteran in Greece) and younger brother Lefteris (Julio George Katsis), a wheelchair user with a snappy temper and a vulgar sense of humour.
Radiating glum hilarity without even opening her mouth, Kokkidou is the chief comic energy source of Black Stone, playing a classically overprotective matriarch who spends the film in increasingly desperate denial that her beloved eldest son may have abandoned his family for a better life elsewhere. “He’ll come back and things will go back to normal”, Haroula assures the camera team. When co-workers tell her that Panos is guilty of organised welfare fraud, she angrily refutes all charges. On hearing rumours that he may have a secret African girlfriend, she protest: “Couldn’t he find a Greek woman to steal his money?”
In time, Haroula’s wider dysfunctional family expands to include Michalis (Kevin Zans Ansong), a Greek-born taxi driver of Ghanian heritage, who becomes a kind of stand-in brother to Lefteris. This gives Jacovides plenty of scope to satirise casual racism in contemporary Greece, not just among socially conservative older people like Haroula but also among earnest young liberals. One of the film’s recurring subplots involves a group of white political activists who call themselves the Athens Black Panthers, and vainly implore Michalis to become their sole black member. Black Stone couches these potentially prickly themes in levity and empathy, especially towards the old-fashioned but essentially kindly Haroula, who comes to understand her own xenophobia is rooted in parochial ignorance and unfounded fear.
In stylistic terms, Black Stone mostly sticks within the parameters of its mock-documentary format, with film crew members sporadically intruding into the background. Jacovides takes a few liberties with the internal logic when exposition demand it, notably during a brief dream sequence, but in general he finds rich comic potential in the familiar visual grammar of observational reportage, talking-heads interviews and close-up domestic vignettes. There is artful intent behind his artless surface: what looks like sloppy jump-cut editing consistently lends extra comic zip to the steady stream of verbal and visual punchlines that come thick and fast, from first frame to last.
Brisk and bouncy and light on its feet, Black Stone rarely strikes a dud note. The climactic return of the prodigal Panos is arguably a red herring, too thin on explanatory context, while the tragicomic effect of his belated homecoming is handled with odd flippancy for such a warm-hearted and humane film.But by that time this genial little charmer has already worked its magic. A soundtrack peppered with vintage Greek chansons lends extra poignancy to Haroula’s slow disillusionment as she frantically searches for her idealised lost son, a proud woman out of time, clinging onto traditional values that her feckless offspring have resoundingly rejected. In a touching coda, Jacovides dedicates the film to his own mother.
Director: Spiros Jacovides
Screenwriters: Ziad Semaan, Spiros Jacovides
Cast: Eleni Kokkidou, Julio George Katsis, Achilleas Chariskos, Kevin Zans Ansong
Cinematography: Andre Lascaris
Editing: Ioanna Pogiantzi
Producer: Maria Kontogianni
Production company, world sales: Steficon (Greece)
Venue: Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Meet The Neighbors)
In Greek
87 minutes
