What We Ask of a Statue is That It Doesn’t Move

In this shapeshifting essay film by French-Greek filmmaker Daphné Hérétakis, we visit the streets of Athens in July 2015 and the wake of an austerity referendum, finding friends and strangers, pop songs and poetry, fallen monuments and hopes for the future. It is a lyrical sketch of a time of personal and political transition – culminating in an image of liberating, apocalyptic possibility.

Niki is a resistance fighter living in a nightmarish dictatorship in Athens, 1972, and Lefteris is her son, who will be forced sooner or later to cut the thread that binds them together.

This film begun in september 2008, in Exarchia, "the Mecca" of athenian contestation. As the months passed and the political situation of Greece evolved, the film became the canvas on which testimonies finally laid, thus composing the fragmented landscape of a country in crisis.

As the song says: "I'm 26 years old but only 4 useful. I don't understand anything". 8 people read aloud private texts (sms, letters, emails) written or received by Daphné Hérétakis in the months leading up to her 26th birthday. The film proposes to take these texts out of the realm of intimacy and put them back into the public space and the collective nature of the film. The result is a romantic and absurd cadavre exquis, which addresses slightly depressed sensibilities.