Birds in the swamp

Athens 1967. The political assassinations and the background between the government and foreign powers, on the occasion of the "Polk Case", where an innocent leftist was convicted for the murder of an American journalist in Greece.

Refers to the women who fought in the Greek Civil War 1946-1949, were exiled or tortured.

Girls of the Rain concludes Alida Dimitriou’s filmtrilogy on the contribution of women to political struggles in Greece during the twentieth century. The film is about women imprisoned and tortured during the Colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-1974. At the time, these womenwere in their twenties. Fifty women offer their testimonials. They all share the ethos of the women who took part in the National Resistance, and pursue the establishment of human dignity just as persistently. The “Girls of the Rain” consider themselves successors of those women. One of them said:“...we are their successors, just like the youth of today are our successors”. Remarkably, these are the words of a woman deprived by her torturers of the ability to have children.

The film describes the custom called "Saint Peter's Stew" and is celebrated in Spata during the feast of Peter and Paul. In the year the film was made, 1978, the performance of the custom took on a strong socio-political content. He was associated with the residents' protest movement against the government's decision to move the airport to Spata. Besides the description of the custom, the film reveals two more important points. The first is that, as anthropology also claims, customs are not simple survivals of ancient institutions but are constantly transformed, forming an operative framework, in which the social problems of the time are inscribed as content. The second is that the respective protest and resistance movements are expressed through existing social symbols changing their content.

On the island of Fourni in Ikaria, a researcher observes the lives of the inhabitants. Without a predetermined script, without ready-made questions, as a simple observer. Through this research, the society of Fourni comes to life before our eyes through its people, through memories, through anxieties, through daily toil. On the island, the men are sailors and the women have taken on all the jobs that one would more conventionally expect men to perform, from construction work to farm work. The camera of Alinda Dimitriou and Nikos Kanakis thus vividly records the relations between the two sexes and how the division of labor is a key cog in the functioning of the social machine.

Coal workers are one of the professions that disappeared in our time due to the rapid technological development of industrial society. The film refers to the survival problems faced by both the coal traders and its producers, mainly the coal miners. Black and white emphasizes not only the product of production, coal, but also the acuteness of the problem. In addition, he follows the latter throughout the production of charcoal in the forests of Evia, where they move as a family. It describes the different phases of the production process, alongside the different phases of their reflection on the future, the whole family together and each member separately. Alinda Dimitriou does not use a questionnaire to elicit their thoughts – she lets the conversation "unravel the tangle of confessions", as she typically said.