J.A.C.E.

In his film, Menelaos Karamaghiolis attempts to trace the evolution of the gypsy race in Europe, particularly in Greece, through four different points of view. These are expressed in the narrations of four people: the Teacher, the Photographer, Tamara, the old gypsy lady and the young girl Aima.

After her fighter pilot boyfriend commits suicide by crashing his jet into the ocean, a Greek fashion model reflects on their relationship and how it started, developed, then deteriorated. After a long bout of depression over his death, she learns that he may not be dead after all. Why would he have kept himself hidden from her, and will she ever be able to find him again?

​Jelani secretly married a woman from a different tribe. They fled their country in order to avoid being killed. On foot – and every other way they could – they arrived at a river, months later. Some people die crossing it; others swim across it and enter Europe. But, once they set foot in the first European country, Greece, they found themselves and their children homeless and socially excluded, without being able to move on or go back. Their only solution is to enter Germany illegally, the smugglers say. But they have no money to pay for the whole family to travel. Jelani is faced with the dilemma: If one of the children leaves unaccompanied and arrives safe and sound in Germany, he or she can help the family obtain visas to enter that country. His children will learn in a violent way either how one finds their own planet or how one creates it from scratch; and whether Germany is really the solution or just a new nightmare.

A gravely ill, abused three-legged stray dog, abandoned in an industrial desert at Aspropyrgos, a town near Athens; a London based charity whose mission is to help the neglected animals of Greece; a group of young volunteers who patrol Aspropyrgos and nurse the strays – these are the characters of the film, in a nightmarish place, a hellhole for many abandoned animals. Does the sick three-legged hound stand any chance of getting adopted, becoming healthy again and running across the fields of Essex? Why are the Greekies, the strays from Greece, so popular when it comes to being adopted abroad? With an unexpected ending, the film tries to discover whether there is any hope for the doomed dogs and for a doomed area outside Athens.