The screening on Thursday May 14 will be introduced by strand programmer Erifili Missiou. It will feature English subtitles.
Synopsis:
Fleeing political turmoil in Greece, Ilias (Aris Retsos) travels to Paris and seeks out Gerasimos (Hristos Tsagas), a homesick relative working there as a furrier. Ilias carries with him the photograph of a singer whom he presents as his sister, thus causing a series of misunderstandings that leads each man into a tangled web of deception and delusion that lays bare their complex relationships of a Greek of the Diaspora.
Curator's note:
Drawing from his difficult childhood in Ethiopia where he faced discrimination due to his mixed-race heritage, The Photograph (1986) is Papatakis’ most personal and sensitive film. It also reflects his lifelong experience of dislocation - from Ethiopia to Greece, Greece to France, France to the United States, and back again. Uncharacteristically naturalistic in style, it highlights the hardships and humiliation of migration, ostracization, and illiteracy. For Papatakis, economic migration meant being severed from one's culture and condemned to a perpetual, often futile struggle to integrate.
The Criterion Collection:
Nico Papatakis brilliantly dissects the soul of modern Greece in this darkly comic, cuttingly perceptive exile’s tale.
