Hate attacks on the rise in Greece, activists warn

By Harry van Versendaal

Racially motivated attacks have risen in number as well as intensity in Greece as authorities’ efforts to tackle the problem remain halfhearted, a network of human rights organizations has warned.

Greece, a main transit point for Asian and African immigrants seeking to set foot in the European Union, has seen a growing wave of xenophobia prompted by a mix of economic malaise and political disillusionment. Golden Dawn, a neofascist party that wants to kick foreigners out of the country, currently controls 18 seats in the 300-member House while polling around 11 percent in recent surveys.

A total of 154 racist attacks were recorded in 2012 by the Racist Violence Recording Network, a collection of 30 nongovernmental organizations initiated two years ago by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) that presented its 2012 report yesterday in Athens. But the actual number is believed to be a lot higher as victims are either too scared to report incidents to the police or because they are turned away.

“What we are faced with is murderous, racist violence. Its objective is no longer just to intimidate, but to cause victims,” NCHR president Kostis Papaioannou told the press briefing.

“Some people thought they did not have a dog in this fight. However, the range of attacks is growing in terms of geography as well as targets,” he said, mentioning that gay people are now also on the list of potential targets.

The report was released a week after more than 30 Bangladeshi strawberry pickers in the Peloponnese district of Manolada suffered shotgun wounds during a dispute over six months of back pay with their supervisors. The three foremen have been charged with attempted murder and illegal weapons possession and will await trial in prison custody.

Most of the documented hate attacks occurred in the Athens districts of Omonia, Aghios Panteleimonas, Attiki Square and Amerikis Square – all areas with large immigrant populations. Forty-four of the victims were asylum seekers, four were recognized refugees, 15 possessed residence permits, and 79 were unregistered, according to the report. The majority were Muslims.

Most victims were attacked in public spaces such as squares or on public transport, usually by groups of men dressed in black, and at times with military trousers, wearing helmets or with their faces covered. Several carried Golden Dawn insignia or had been spotted at public events organized by the party. Perpetrators occasionally included Albanian immigrants.

In many cases victims reported the use of weapons, such as clubs, crowbars, folding batons, chains, brass knuckles, knives and broken bottles. Assailants sometimes used large dogs.

“The victims had suffered multiple injuries,” said Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, head of the UNHCR office in Greece, ranging from fractures and contusions to symptoms of posttraumatic stress.

Fear of attack has turned several neighborhoods in Athens into no-go areas for the capital’s immigrant population.

“People are too afraid to walk out of their home to buy bread,” said the president of the Association of Afghans United in Greece, Reza Golami.

Police involvement

Activists worryingly noted a growing involvement of police officials and public servants in racist attacks. Most such incidents, the report said, concerned duty officers who resorted to illegal acts and violent practices while carrying out routine checks.

“Many in the police force have come to view racist violence as something normal, a natural state of affairs,” Papaioannou said, adding that part of the problem is that xenophobic language has moved deep into mainstream territory.

Before the 2012 elections, Antonis Samaras, now leader of Greece’s conservative-led coalition, pledged to “reclaim” cities from the hordes of illegal immigrants.

Some of the attacks, the report said, came from public servants. Earlier this month a bus driver in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, forced two passengers to get off his bus because they were immigrants.

Experts said that many victims are reluctant to report the attacks because they lack legal documents and are therefore afraid that the police will arrest and deport them.

“Instead of investigating whether a crime has been committed, police officers rather check whether the victims have legal residence permits,” said Vassilis Papastergiou from the Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Migrants and Refugees.

Activists said authorities should instead provide for the suspension of arrest and deportation decisions against victims who file a complaint. The report recommended that victims be given a residence permit on humanitarian grounds, similar to the protection awarded to victims of trafficking – a status awarded to the Manolada victims.

“We hope that the interest in these people will not last only as long as the spotlight is on Manolada,” Papaioannou said.

Pressed by human rights activists, Greece pledges to stop deportations of Syrian refugees

By Harry van Versendaal

Greece on Wednesday pledged to halt deportations of Syrian refugees, as human rights activists called for measures to ensure that asylum seekers from the war-torn Middle Eastern state have access to Greek territory and safety.

“No Syrian refugees will be detained or returned,” Manolis Katriadakis, who is responsible for migration issues at the Ministry of Public Order, told a conference organized in Athens by the United Nations Refugee Agency.

“Deportation decisions on Syrians will be suspended and reviewed every six months,” he said, adding that authorities were trying to improve access to asylum services for them.

Two years since the uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, it is estimated that more than 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died while tens of thousands of political prisoners remain unaccounted for. The UNHCR reckons that over 1.3 million refugees, 71 percent of whom are women and children, have fled Syria and a further 2 million have been displaced within the country as the Arab Spring-inspired protest movement degenerated into an increasingly sectarian conflict.

“The Syria situation is one of the most complex and dangerous in the world and the largest and most quickly deteriorating humanitarian crisis on the planet,” UNHCR regional refugee coordinator for Syria Panos Moumtzis said.

“The situation is desperate and is becoming explosive,” he said.

Greece, a key transit point for Asian and African immigrants seeking to sneak into the European Union, has been relatively unaffected by the Syria crisis, figures suggest.

Last year, about 8,000 Syrians were detected entering or residing in Greece illegally. A total 1,623 Syrian nationals were arrested in the first quarter of 2013. There is no official number of the Syrians living in Greece at the moment.

“Greece must remain on standby, but it is by no means faced with a [humanitarian] crisis, said Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, head of the UNHCR office in Greece, adding that the brunt of the refugee exodus has been borne by Syria’s neighbors.

Lebanon has received an estimated 417,827 refugees while 432,263 have fled into Jordan. An estimated 400,000 Syrian refugees are in Turkey and Iraq has provided refuge for 130,379 people.

Strengthened security in the Evros region, including a 10.5-kilometer barbed-wire fence along the Turkish frontier, has led to a spike in arrivals on Greece’s eastern Aegean islands only a few kilometers from the Turkish coast. Would-be immigrants pay smugglers thousands of dollars for space on a packed rubber dinghy. Dozens drown in the sea every year. Those who manage to get a foot on the ground have to deal with messy asylum and immigration systems and the growing menace of far-right thugs.

Like all other immigrants, Syrians are subject to arrest, detention, rejection of asylum, pushbacks and deportations, activists say.

In 2012, the number of Syrians granted asylum in the first instance was just two. Because of Greece’s bad reputation, most don’t even bother to apply for protection status – only 152 applications were submitted last year. Meanwhile, at least 55 have been deported since last year according to Human Rights Watch, although Greek authorities deny the allegations, saying these concerned voluntary repatriations.

“Detention is problematic and conditions are inappropriate,” Tsarbopoulos said of the overcrowded and underserviced migrant camps across the country while stressing the problems caused by the lack of interpreters and qualified interviewers to even establish if the asylum seekers are Syrians or not.

“Clearly, they are not treated the way they should be by the authorities,” he said.

Greece’s much-criticized asylum system is finally set for a revamp. In 2011 the country, which has often complained of unfair burden-sharing to its peers in the 27-member bloc, was found in breach of the Convention on Human Rights over detention conditions at immigrant camps. The new asylum system, which will not involve the police, is to go into effect on June 1, Katriadakis said.

“That will hopefully solve most of the problems,” he added.

Fateful encounters

By Harry van Versendaal

John Appel knew he wanted to make a film about chance; All he had to do was wait for the right sequence of events. So when Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik went on his murderous rampage on July 22, 2011, the Dutch director reached for his camera.

“I wanted to make a film about how people deal with fate. It had to be based on a tragic event,” Appel, 55, said during an interview at the Olympion Theater after a screening of “Wrong Time Wrong Place,” part of Thessaloniki’s Documentary Festival which wraps up this weekend.

“I didn’t want to concentrate on who committed the crimes – only on the victims. This is a story about why people found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said of the film that opened the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November.

After setting off a car bomb outside government headquarters in Oslo, the 33-year-old Breivik went on a shooting spree on Utoya island, where more than 500 people had gathered for the Labor Party’s annual summer camp. Eight people died in the bombing and 69 were killed on the island. More than 240 were injured. Breivik claimed the killings were “cruel and necessary” to protect his country from being overrun by Muslims.

The documentary follows five people who either narrowly survived the massacre or had a close friend or relative killed in it. Harald, a Norwegian civil servant, had just arrived at the office that morning when the bomb went off, killing several of his colleagues and leaving him partially blind. Ritah, a pregnant woman from Uganda, only decided to go to the summer camp at the very last minute. She escaped by hiding inside a toilet with another two people. One of these was Hakon, who had noticed Breivik on the ferry to the island. Visiting from Georgia, Natia managed to escape, but her friend Tamta was the last person Breivik shot before being arrested by the police. The heartbreaking account of her parents is central to the film.

Convincing his characters to take part in the documentary, especially so soon after the tragic events, was not easy. “Some people did not trust me,” said Appel, adding that people were naturally put off by the sensation-hungry media. With others, he was able to convince them that his motives were different.

“I had to persuade them that I did not wish to exploit the drama. It was not my intention to investigate why the killer acted the way he did. I was not interested in his story, but in the story of the victims that were able to survive,” he said.

Quite fittingly, chance also played a big part in making the film. Appel started filming before he had found any characters or a story. “I was looking for characters and then, during filming really, by chance I met the individuals that appear in the film,” he said.

“I totally could not find the lady from Uganda [Ritah]. I wanted to tell the story of the people who hid inside the toilet but I could only find two of them. I was looking for Ritah in Uganda but I could not find her, and then, thanks to a coincidental contact, I found out she was living in the Netherlands, where she had applied for political asylum,” he said.

“I visited her, the next day I filmed, and the day after that she gave birth to the baby. I happened to be in the right place at the right time,” he said.

Watching the film, it’s hard not to be intrigued by the way cultural and religious differences affect the way people deal with tragedy. The mother of Tamta, who can be seen praying in an apartment filled with religious icons and family pictures, appears to believe that the fate of her daughter, her only daughter, was sealed in old religious texts. “It was a relief for her. It was a relief to discover the book that had predicted what happened – that is being born on Christmas Day – meant something special and this was in the hand of the gods and she had to die anyway,” said Appel, who is not religious himself.

He says the cold Nordic character is perhaps more suitable to deal with such circumstances. “Look at how they dealt with the court case and Breivik himself. They were extremely civilized. If it had taken place in Greece, maybe people would try to kill him. Norwegians are different,” he said. Judges declared Breivik sane and sentenced him to at least 21 years in prison.

Appel, who has directed more than 30 documentaries for cinema and television, says his next project will be completely coincidental – including the starting point of the film. “If you make a coincidental film, you meet one person that leads you to the next person, and that leads you to another person, and this whole thing will reveal everything life is about,” he said.

Does he think that the realization of this unbearable lightness of being, as it were, should make us treat life a bit less seriously? “Yes, I think so. One of the views I want to express in this film is that life is not controllable. You can try to live as safely as you can, but you never know what is going to happen. You may get sick or get involved in a serious accident,” he said.

“So you should be a little more open to the unexpected and not try to control everything in life. It’s really not worth it.”

Too big for his garage

By Harry van Versendaal

In a recession-wracked city where one is constantly being told that the crisis is an opportunity to be taken advantage of, it is refreshing to actually meet someone who has succeeded, with little means but plenty of drive, to create something out of nothing.

In the span of just two years, blogger Manolis Andriotakis, has published a new book, created a weekly webcast presenting fresh publications and, most recently, launched an independent online channel called GarageTV. To top it all off, Andriotakis just finished a documentary – his third – about what has been one of the most useful tools in the process: Twitter. “#Followme. Exploring Twitter,” a 33-minute film on the pioneering microblogging website, features interviews with media experts and local tweeps, and which premiered at the 15th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.

Speaking from a bare, soft-white lab overlooking the capital’s former entertainment mecca, Psyrri – now a scruffy, derelict neighborhood filled with empty shop fronts – Andriotakis, a cheerful, soft-spoken man in his late 30s, talks about his efforts to create a platform that will encompass all his concurrent interests and activities. “The big wager is to make all this financially sustainable. We are in the middle of a broad-scale redistribution of power with the Internet operating as a vehicle for change. I think that one of the biggest challenges that everyone, including those who still have a steady job, has to face is the need to adopt new sustainability models that do not rely on traditional channels of power,” he says during a break from a class on online video journalism that he is teaching. With Greece locked in its sixth year of recession and unemployment hovering well over 26 percent, it all makes perfect sense.

Born in downtown Athens, Andriotakis spent most of his childhood years in Kypseli, one of the capital’s densest and most congested neighborhoods. He and his wife moved to a suburb north of Athens a few years ago, mainly to find some peace and quiet. “The thing is I do need quiet,” he says. He recently published his seventh book, “I was Black and White,” a collection of sketches, texts and poems inspired by the Greek crisis. After turning his garage into a makeshift studio, he went on to launch “GarageBooks,” a weekly online program where he presented new books and interviews. More than a year and 44 shows later, “GarageBooks” is probably still the only book show out there but to his disappointment, it’s something that most local publishers do not seem to appreciate. Andriotakis, who depends on translation and video work to make a living, still needs to dig into his own pockets for most of the preview copies. He and the growing number of people behind the new channel are looking for ways to make the project sustainable without giving in to online ads and product placement.

“Sure, you need to support yourself. However, I am trying to do this without compromising my values. That is very important to me. I want to be flexible, but it is very important. It’s a more difficult path, but it is more in line with what we are going through. If it does not work, I am always willing to re-examine my options,” he says. He knows that some critics will always be waiting around the corner. But he remains optimistic, and there are already signs that it will become sustainable.

Andriotakis was still working for Eleftherotypia newspaper when he started to blog in 2004. He logged on to Twitter five years later. The move from blogging to microblogging came naturally, he says. But it came at a price. As with most bloggers, Twitter took his time and energy away from lengthier, more analytical blog posts. “But it was also a more interesting place to be in,” he says.

Twitter, as well as Facebook, are always open on his computer screen. His interpretation of them is utilitarian, almost technocratic. “They are tools for achieving objectives,” he says, adding that he uses them selectively, taking advantage of the strengths of each service. But he makes no secret of his preferences. “Twitter is more dynamic, more direct, but also more demanding. Its 140-character limit means that you have to be laconic, but that is also its comparative advantage because it forces you to be more precise,” he says. “Twitter is also more versatile. It is more receptive to social change, to the entrance of new users,” he says, with recent data showing the San Francisco-based network has surpassed half a billion members – about a third of the active global Internet population.

We are introduced to a tiny yet diverse sample of these users in “#Followme.” In the film, Andriotakis discusses how Twitter has changed human interaction with Greek twitterati, as well as with renowned cyber-skeptic Evgeny Morozov, tech writer Jeff Jarvis, former Public Order Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, and a self-styled anarchist troll sporting a dragon’s head mask. One of the first things he did when he started shooting was to have some of them meet offline in the same room. It didn’t work. “Interaction among them left a lot to be desired. Offline communication follows very different rules,” he says.

Most studies suggest Twitter is not a reliable indicator of public opinion. But does that mean it is an overrated, deceptive microcosm? Or can it not become more than the sum of its parts? Does it not, as many techno-optimists would like us to believe, have the power to mobilize toward a superior, offline end? “#Followme” inevitably discusses the role of digital technologies in propping up popular protest movements – a view made popular after pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. “I used to think that Twitter is value-neutral. But it seems like I was wrong,” Andriotakis says. He quotes a metaphor first used by Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” who compares the Internet with a car on an icy road. No matter how good your brakes are, he says, the car will not stop. What counts most, Andriotakis says, is the conditions in which you act and react. “Twitter has a democratizing, liberalizing potential but it really depends a lot on the overall level of media literacy, on how educated and well-trained people are,” he says.

Such concerns are clearly reflected in the issue of online etiquette. With commenters able to hide behind a veil of anonymity, Twitter and other online forums habitually degenerate into arenas of vitriol and hate. For Andriotakis, withholding your identity on the public domain defeats the purpose. “You should by no means ban anonymity, but you should not encourage it either. There is great benefit from being public. Sure, there are risks, but living in constant fear and mistrust will get you nowhere. Putting an issue out in public gives you, or perhaps somebody else, a better chance to deal with it,” he says. Andriotakis, who produced a documentary about the safety threat posed by illegal billboards along Greece’s highways, says the grassroots campaign for their removal, which included road accident victims and their families, would never have been as successful if it had been anonymous.

While some Internet users choose to disguise their identity, others work extra hard to feed and promote it. Several studies have established a link between social media and socially aggressive narcissism. Skeptics say narcissists have simply found a new outlet to vent their inflated egos. “We all want to be loved, we all want to be noticed and to be attractive. Make no mistake, we are interacting in the midst of an attention industry and we are naturally acting a bit like children, always seeking a bit of attention. But you should at least try to draw attention in a way that is true to yourself – even if it sometimes comes out a bit angry or nervous.”

@andriotakis for one, does.

American finds the meaning of life in orphanage for HIV+ children

By Harry van Versendaal

Rocky Braat went to India “seeking authenticity.” When he got there he found a bit more than he had bargained for.

The hero of Steve Hoover’s documentary “Blood Brother,” which scooped up the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is also his best friend. Hoover decided to make a movie about his former flatmate after their lives started to follow totally different trajectories about five years ago. It was then that 30-year-old Rocky, born into a dysfunctional and borderline abusive family, decided to quit Pittsburgh PA and a potential career in graphic design and instead move into an orphanage for HIV-positive children in the Asian country’s southern Tamil Nadu state.

Rocky – whom the kids call “Rocky Anna,” Anna being the Tamil word for “brother” – spends his days at the refuge where, as the only adult male, he eagerly fills in as amateur nurse, entertainer and father. In the process, he grapples with extremely challenging circumstances, pain and loss – as he is forced to watch helplessly as some of the kids die of the disease. But he has found purpose.

“I was moved and fascinated by what Rocky was doing. Eventually it just kind of dawned on me to document Rocky and share his story,” Hoover told Kathimerini English Edition in an interview ahead of the film’s screening at the 15th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.

“He had been inviting me to come and visit him in India anyway. After sharing the idea to do a documentary about him, he was very much open to the idea and so I began to move forward with it,” said Hoover, who had until that time been making commercials and music videos.

In early 2011, Hoover took a plane to India with a crew of six. He returned to the village later that year for another three weeks to shoot the second part of the movie. They all stayed in Rocky’s ramshackle, rat-infested hut. Inevitably, being there and making this movie has been a transformative experience for him too.

“It was the first time I had ever been out of the First World and the first time that I had ever made a personal connection with HIV/AIDS. Those two experiences alone had a profound impact on me. I began to care deeply about things I had never given a second thought to. I gained a tremendous amount of perspective on the life of my best friend and learned a great deal about true sacrifice,” he said.

Mostly shot with Canon 7D and 5D cameras (several scenes have been captured on super 8 mm film), “Blood Brother” is a beautifully crafted movie that manages to be heartfelt and inspirational without giving in to easy sensationalism or sentimentalism. Working on the movie has caused Hoover to re-examine the value of his time and energy, he says.

“In the words of Rocky, I want my life to count. I don’t want to spend my days only to accomplish nothing. I know I’ll have to continue to work on things that are empty and meaningless, but that can’t be all that I do,” he said.

The first trip to India was crowd-funded through Kickstarter. The team used up the funds, and had to dig into their own pockets for the second trip. So far virtually everyone has worked for free – donating their time, talent and expertise toward the project.

“I was impacted by the amount of support we received. It’s humbling to look back on and realize how much of this depended on the generosity of others. Receiving that much support from so many different people gave me a lot of hope for how much people actually do care,” Hoover said.

The creators say they have zero debt and are set up to donate all their profits. They are using all of their monetary gain from the film to support the hostel and Rocky, as well as other HIV/AIDS initiatives around the world.

In one of the movie’s most interesting interludes, visa complications temporarily send Rocky back to his Pittsburgh neighborhood. When he is not bored, an obviously out-of-place Rocky is awkwardly examining products on the overflowing shelves of the local supermarket.

When he finally returns, the film enters its most harrowing episode, as one of the little boys from the orphanage is so sick that even the doctors at the hospital have given up on him. It is almost painful to watch Rocky’s steadfast refusal to leave the boy’s side for days and nights on end, washing his sores, covering him in lotion and refusing to allow him to die.

Rocky is still living in India, happily married to a local woman. He certainly doesn’t seem to have lost any of his energy or purpose according to Hoover. He is now making plans to build a halfway house for the kids in the hostel that reach the age limit – the refuge cannot hold kids beyond the age of 15 – and have to enter society and live on their own. He is also planning to start small businesses that the kids can run and operate when they come of age.

“The businesses will be fair labor hours that the kids can handle with all of the challenges that come from having HIV/AIDS. We plan to accomplish all of this with money generated from the film,” Hoover said. It’s a fitting ambition.

Documentary festival rolling in Thessaloniki

By Harry van Versendaal

Dancer-turned-filmmaker Bess Kargman’s award-winning “First Position,” a documentary about the toughness of mind and body demanded of young classical ballet dancers, will open this year’s 10-day Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF), which gets under way on March 15.

The film follows a handful of boys and girls from various parts of the world as they train for the Youth America Grand Prix in New York City, a competition that could determine their future in the ballet world. The documentary has picked up numerous accolades, including a Jury Prize at the San Francisco DocFest and audience awards at DOC NYC and the Portland International Film Festival.

Now in its 15th year, the TDF has drawn a big following of movie buffs and filmmakers who make the annual trip to the northern port city for the rich crop of hard-hitting productions and interesting side events.

“Its success is not just measured by the high numbers of people who flock to its theaters every year,” said Konstantinos Aivaliotis, a visual anthropology expert who is currently doing research on the festival.

“The festival is really talked about abroad, ranking in the top five – if not top three – on the European doc fest circuit,” he said.

Despite the financial difficulties, organizers have managed to bring together about 200 films from 45 countries, as well as 58 local productions.

Alongside “First Position,” festival highlights include Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated film “The Invisible War,” a shocking account of rape and sexual assault in the US military. Based on more than 100 interviews, the Arizona-born director exposes the systemic cover-up of sexual crimes and the everyday struggle of victims – mostly women but also men – to rebuild their lives and find justice.

In his Sundance winner “Blood Brother,” Pittsburg director Steve Hoover travels to southern India to document his longtime friend’s mission to help children living with HIV and AIDS. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience award for American documentaries at what is the largest independent film festival in the US.

Dutch John Appel’s “Wrong Time, Wrong Place,” billed as a film about “how small, seemingly trivial events can upset the fine balance between life and death,” features discussions with five people who were caught up in the 2011 bomb attack in Oslo and the ensuing shooting spree on the island of Utoya where Norwegian far-right activist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded 242.

In “Forbidden Voices,” Swiss director Barbara Miller documents the lives of dissident bloggers in Cuba, China and Iran who use their laptops to fight for free speech and press freedom.

The organizers have also prepared a tribute to Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman, maker of the classic 260-minute trilogy “The Battle of Chile,” which chronicles the atrocities of the Pinochet regime. The 71-year-old director, who won five-star reviews for his 2010 philosophical cine-essay on history and memory, “Nostalgia for the Light,” has been booked for a workshop in Thessaloniki.

Uncomfortably relevant

Stuck in recession for a sixth year, debt-wracked Greece is struggling with severe austerity measures and sky-high unemployment. It’s a lethal mix that has fueled social turmoil and political polarization as reflected in the meteoric ascent of the country’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. It all makes the doc fest uncomfortably topical.

“Documentaries can serve as an alternative news source and highlight issues that do not come up in mainstream media,” Aivaliotis said.

He says the crisis has not produced a major shift in subject matter, but at least a few of this year’s 58 movies seem to be influenced by the zeitgeist in one way or another.

“Neo-Nazi, the Holocaust of Memory,” shot by established TV journalist and documentarist Stelios Kouloglou, revisits the country’s path from the German occupation during World War II to the rise of Golden Dawn, which currently controls 18 seats in the Greek Parliament.

“To the Wolf,” a documentary-narrative hybrid shot in the mountains of western Greece by first-time directing duo Christina Koutsospyrou and Britain’s Aran Hughes, follows two shepherd families as they try to survive the Greek crisis. The production earned flattering reviews when it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

Nikos Dayandas, who last year left Thessaloniki with the Film Critics’ Award for his film “Sayome,” returns with “The Little Land” to tell the story of a disaffected young urban couple who decide to try their luck on the remote Aegean island of Icaria.

The Greek economic crisis, which has touched all levels of society, also means that local documentarists – never a spoiled lot – will continue to struggle for funding. But on the other hand, they have technology on their side as digital video is making films cheaper to produce.

“The means [to make a documentary] are more accessible now and the need to cooperate has started to be more obvious, so I think we will continue to see fresh things from Greek creators,” Aivaliotis said.

Approximately 520 films will be available in this year’s Doc Market, including all those screened as part of the official program. Around 60 buyers will be attending from Europe, the USA and Canada.

Staring at the big picture

By Harry van Versendaal

Photo-sharing app Instagram last week announced it had reached the 100 million-user milestone. Jennifer Trausch is one of them. But the Berlin-based artist much prefers to make her instant photographs using a refrigerator-sized vintage Polaroid camera.

Trausch, 36, can normally be found operating one of the five such machines, built in the late 1970s by the former US tech giant, at her studio in Berlin, where she moved this January after spending a year in Paris.

Before moving to Europe, the Ohio-born artist lectured and made photographs at the 20×24 Polaroid studio in Manhattan, where she was director of photography for about eight years. In a daring project that spanned from 2006 to 2011, Trausch, a Cleveland Institute of Art graduate, took the vintage camera out of the comfort zone of the protected studio environment and onto the rural roads of the American South to shoot poster-size, black-and-white pictures of fairs, auctions, bars and rodeos – a project that gave birth to her well-received “Touching Ground” exhibition.

From Germany, Trausch is currently trying to spread the love for instant photography, putting much of her time and energy into Impossible Works, a Berlin-based nonprofit supported by the Impossible Project, a company that manufactures new instant film for Polaroid 600 and SX-70 cameras. The mission of Impossible Works is to support artistic projects made with instant films.

Trausch was recently invited to Greece to participate in the jury of the 4th Cedefop Photomuseum Award – a 5,000-euro prize granted to photographers from all over the world by the EU’s European Center for the Development of Vocational Training and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography in the context of its PhotoBiennale.

During her stay in the northern port city, Trausch delivered two two-hour workshops at the museum on the basics of working with Impossible Project instant films with a variety of cameras and film types.

In an interview with Kathimerini English Edition, Trausch discussed her love for large-format photography and the particularities of her work in the digital era.

What drew you to large-format photography? What do you think is special about the 20×24?

I started out in photojournalism / documentary photography, so I really began my career shooting with small- and medium-format cameras. In 2001, I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to use the 20×24 Polaroid camera, and I have been working almost exclusively on large format ever since. I like how laborious shooting with big cameras is, how much attention you end up giving to each image.

Large cameras, especially the 20×24, also demand much more out of their subjects. The 20×24’s grandiosity makes people look into it in a different way, perhaps because it commands a certain kind of respect as a human-scale object. With the 20×24, there’s always a limited depth of field, and the way the world falls off behind the focal plane can be quite surreal, soft and graceful.

The 20×24 instant prints also have a material, painterly quality that is all their own; it is the sharp detail of a 20×24 negative in a contact-print, mixed with the softness of a print made by the diffusion transfer process.

How are you able to carry around and work with such a big and heavy machine that was meant for indoor use? Is it a hindrance?

The 20×24 Polaroid cameras – there are five original units built in the late 1970s – each weigh 105 kilos, so I had no choice but to find a way of working that was relatively easy. For my “Touching Ground” project, I chose B&W film since the film is fast enough that I could work in most conditions without extra lighting or equipment. I tried to simplify the shooting process so that it was just the camera, film, black cloths to keep the light out, and my assistant Kimberlee Venable and I.

I tend to not like when too much credence is given to the technical side of photography, as in what equipment or techniques were used for a certain effect, but I have to admit that in this case the camera had a huge influence over what we could and couldn’t do. Sometimes it held us back as the camera couldn’t always go where we wanted it to go (on a rooftop or on an oil rig) and other times it was exhausting to push it up muddy hills or to lift it over train tracks. Taking the camera out and setting up always took a lot of effort, which added a certain pressure on each shoot to get things right.

This also meant that when I didn’t “get the shot” I hoped for, it felt much more devastating because of the extreme physical effort it took to set it up in the first place. Perhaps if I had had more hands to help we wouldn’t have felt this pressure and disappointment so much, but I really preferred to work without a giant crew so that the process with my subjects could be intimate.

What are your favorite themes? What kind of things do you like to photograph?

I am interested in the idea of place, the culture and traditions surrounding a particular place at a particular time, and whether I can take you there to feel it.

For me this is always a mix of portraits, landscapes and activities that are indicative of that place. Sometimes it is specific to one environment, such as my “Skateland” series, or in the case of “Touching Ground,” it’s about a much broader portrait of regional American culture.

I also am interested in the idea of sensations in photography – whether images can elicit the physical sensations of being there for the viewer standing in front of the final print. It is always my goal to make images where you could almost feel the heavy humidity on your skin, hear the leaves rustling, or taste a swamp’s scent wafting through the air.

Could you tell us a few things about the Impossible Works project?

Impossible Works is a nonprofit supported by the Impossible Project, the main manufacturer of instant films today. The mission of Impossible Works is to support artistic projects made with instant films. We accept proposals from anyone looking to use and challenge the instant medium.

How does it feel taking photographs with a huge, slow and hard-to-move analog camera in an age when people upload thousands of pictures a second on social media that it takes them all of a second to frame, and their friends all of another second to “like”?

The process of working at 20×24 definitely creates a different kind of image, in the attention that you and your subjects inherently end up giving during a shoot.

The final prints can be shared as you work, in all of their incredible scale and detail, which transforms the building of an image. While this can partly be equated to sharing digital files online or during a shoot, it’s pretty easy to lose the fine, subtle details of an image looking at it on a glowing screen or on the back of a digital camera.

I do share some of my images online in similar ways to many digital photographers, but only as a teaser, not as an end to themselves – I don’t think you can really experience the work until you’re in the room with the original full-size prints.

Do you own any smaller cameras, and, if so, do you like using them?

Yes, quite a few. I use them mostly when I am traveling, which these days is quite often. When I am traveling, I test a lot of Impossible Projects small-format materials on Polaroid SX-70, 680, and 110B cameras, mostly for sketching out ideas.

But in general I’ve gotten quite accustomed to working on a larger ground glass and seeing my images upside down. I think this is the way my brain is wired these days.