PASSING DRAMA

of MELITOPOULOS Angela

GERMANY, FRANCE, GREECE, 2000, 01:06:00

Production : ACADEMY OF MEDIA ART - KOLN, CICV PIERRE SCHAEFFER, MELITOPOULOS Angela
Genre : Documentary, Documentary fiction
Keyword : Exile, War, History, Memory

Summary :
PASSING DRAMA is based on various refugees' testimonies. Drama is a small city in Northern Greece. Drama in Greek means either stage, narrative or theatre play. Drama is inhabited by refugees (including my grand-parents) who lived through the deportation in Asia Minor toward Greece in 1923. During World War II, their children fled from Bulgarian occupation and became slaves in Hitler's Germany. Interviews with those refugees and my father's narrative of his departure from Greece to Vienna relate an oblique path across Europe. Although refugees were considered a mass phenomenon for the first time with the decline of the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Russian Empire, the idea that these refugees had no nationality was never tackled in the history of the countries involved. PASSING DRAMA was conceived as a hypertext structure of images and sounds visualizing memories and remembrance, thanks to the techniques of non-linear editing. This film expresses the point of view of a minority whose past seems to have been eaten out by industrial machines for the privileges of the majority.

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