Standing Aside, Watching

Yorgos Servetas : 2013
Na kathesai kai na koitas

Farmland, empty warehouses and a secluded railway station. Antigone, in her early thirties, is the only person who gets off the train. After an absence of many years she has returned to the Greek town where she grew up, determined to make a life for herself. She meets her long-standing girlfriend Eleni, begins working as an English teacher and finds a boyfriend. Nikos is young and easy-going. He works for a scrap-dealer named Nondas, a bullish man with a criminal record who lives in a caravan. Eleni, who submits herself to Nondas's sexual whims, is regularly humiliated and beaten by him. Nikos is also involved. But Antigone's search for an unassuming life turns out to be more complicated than she had imagined. She feels alienated by the place she once called home. Life on the streets is quiet, but below the surface a collective, unspoken rule of complicity reigns between victims and perpetrators. Everything around her is governed by the unwritten laws of a brutalised male world dominated by discrimination, corruption, violence and submissiveness. In Antigone's last chance to change her fate, will she act or will she stand aside, watching? Yorgos Servetas's second feature screened at Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2013.