Behind the Haystacks

(Πίσω από τις θημωνιές)

dir: Asimina Proedrou

2023

Alas, this isn't a biopic about the legendary wrestler Haystacks Calhoun...

This Greek film, Behind the Haystacks, which was Greece’s submission for 2024 in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards (don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean anything: every country submits their most critically acclaimed movie from that year, and all but 5 are ignored), starts grim and ends grim, because it begins and ends at exactly the same place, near a lake.

It’s grim up north, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. It is a particularly irritating area for Greece, because there is a state in Greece called Macedonia, and an entire country just outside its borders calling itself Macedonia, which Greece, peevishly, refused to acknowledge as being called that since 1991, wanting it instead to be called “the Former Yugoslavian Republic Known as Macedonia” up until recently. Kinda like that time the musical artist known as Prince changed his name to a symbol in order to fuck with his record company, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.

In 2019 there was a compromise that neither country liked resulting in the name change to North Macedonia, which means they’re still both going to keep mewling about it forever.

This flick isn’t at all about two dumb nations fighting over stuff that doesn’t matter to any other sensible person. This flick is about people’s consciences, and a country’s soul.

The film begins with a glendi, a get together of various townsfolk, with food, booze and music free flowing. Some kids wander away from their parents during the festivities and play in the reeds by a lake. And of course, while playing, the kids find some bodies.

These are young children: when they run back and tell some adults, someone sits them down and starts gaslighting them immediately, telling them they didn’t see nothing, and anyway have they ever heard the story about the fisherman who accidentally drowned? Maybe it was his ghost they saw?

Adults are the worst. The point is, the bodies were real, and the vast majority of the people not that far away don’t seem to give much of a fuck.

This story is told in three chapters, with an epilogue that shows us the beginning, but from different angles, with us now knowing how what happened, and why.

The first chapter is from the perspective of Stergios (Stathis Stamoulakatos). He lives with his wife and daughter in this northern backwater, as a farmer, but seems to supplement his income with fishing. He and a much younger chap, Christos (Christos Kontogeorgis) go fishing in Stergios’ little boat, on Lake Doirani.

They catch fish, he then drives across the border to North Macedonia, and gives the fish to some guy in a restaurant. I was certain there would be drugs involved, but, no, they actually want those carp-looking fish.

He then drives all the way back. It’s pretty clear, and keeps being elaborated upon, that it is precious difficult to make a living as a farmer in this farming community, and everyone has to do something else in order to get by. A meeting with the community (mostly angry older men with moustaches) indicates that a) the people here are in some farming co-operative, probably run by corrupt scumbags who are ripping everyone off, and there is hundreds of thousands of Euros missing from the books (or that there was that value of harvested crops missing). Everyone owes money to someone, and everyone is owed money by someone else.

Stergios’ daughter Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda) is excited because it’s her birthday, and she was hoping to spend it with her (female) friends at a nightspot, surely only with her (female) friends and practically no-one else around, but her father, in this moment as in all of his interactions with people throughout the flick, is always angry, and always negative. In this day and age, the year of our lord 2024, he is worried about her reputation and the potential maulings of savage men.

To be fair he’s not wrong, because men are terrible, and Greek men especially, but he is an overbearing and brutish father, despite his clear affection for her. When her plans are rebuffed, she complains of how poor they are, and how outdated her phone is, which brings her shame in the eyes of her peers. He asks his younger neighbour Christos, to chaperone her.

What’s a man to do? Apart from feeling financial pressure, he also gets into trouble owing fees or fines to the municipality or some such, and dreads being sent to jail. All along in the meantime there’s been his wife’s brother hanging around, who seems to be a ne’er do well with a lot of money falling out of his pockets. Thick wads. Serious bank.

What’s a man to do? Well, in this community, the key is to do terrible things and turn a blind eye to human suffering. He starts people smuggling people in his boat across the lake, for money, and not because he likes ferrying people in his little blue boat.

I wonder if that’s ever going to go wrong for anyone…

What I haven’t mentioned – this story is set at a time where a lot of Syrians are fleeing from Syria during that civil war / Islamic State trying to take over the Middle East. There are a bunch of Syrian refugees living in a parlous state on the edges of town. It’s mostly women and children.

This is what a closed off and selfish place this is – the local Orthodox priest tells his congregation that to help the asylum seekers, the refugees, would be a sin. A sin! To help the helpless, to give comfort or aid to people desperately trying to save themselves and their children, would be a sin.

This fucking church and this fucking country… I swear, I wept tears of rage at some points, which were then replaced with a few tears of relief, when some of the people living in this town look at the other selfish dolts and say “the fuck is wrong with you people?”, and do something, however big or little, to help a bit.

Stergios gets angry and angrier as his chapter continues, but there are noticeable gaps, clothing changes and signposts that seem like we’ve only seen part of the story. Like we don’t know what everyone else around Stergios knows about what’s going on, and why he seems increasingly unhinged, until even worse things happen, because of his pride, because of his stupidity, I’m not sure.

Is that intentional? Is it accidental?

Well, no, but it’s not as neatly set out as you might think. The next two chapters show the same time period, as Stergios’ wife Maria (Eleni Ouzounidou) and Anastasia go through those same days, but we see their experiences from their perspectives. Maria is the dutiful wife, scurrying after her husband and constantly trying to play peacemaker, and Anastasia, being young, tries to balance her own hopes, dreams and desires in between trying to pacify that brutish father of hers. But both of them have their own struggles outside of the family home, indirectly impacted with whatever Stergios is doing, but they at least have choices to make

Maria is also a volunteer at the local church, which brings her into conflict with those who try to adhere to whatever nonsense the priest has told the community, but also those, like family friend Georgia (Dina Mihailidou), mother of Christos, who strive to help those who they can. She directly solicits donations of clothes and other unwanted items in order to take them to the makeshift camp, and she also tries to help (not very successfully) some of the refugees needing medical attention, which gets her in to more ‘trouble’.

Not actual legal trouble like her husband’s stupid actions cause, but the trouble of pushing against the stolid conservatism of a community that serves those in charge (the men in control of the ag co-op, the men railing against the refugees, the men profiting from fleecing the refugees, the priests, the cops, all the shitheads) and no-one else.

Anastasia studies as a student nurse, but she dreams of being a singer at the local nightclub, and, let me tell you now, whether this was set 60 years ago, or today, for some reason I can predict the response of a violent patriarch to such a development. She finds love, inevitably, with Christos, and they, out of everyone so far, are the least morally compromised and most decent characters in the flick, but even they can’t remain chaste in the face of such complete corruption. It’s the personal corruption, and the community-wide element, and of course it leads to tragedy.

The film is mostly played for grim social realism’s sake, with only the occasional artistic / symbolic interludes between chapters, usually depicting the lake in stark and almost supernaturally grim ways, with flocks of predatory birds, and young maidens in white struggling to survive. I don’t know how accurate or realistic it might be, beyond depicting the general struggles of people in the world, and how they can often be venal and selfish, like we didn’t know, but it’s a message that bears repeating, until the cycles are broken.

Throughout all of the chapters, all of the stories, are two people who keep appearing. A Syrian mother (Evelyn Assouad) and her son (Yousif Alibeet). We don’t get to know them, they speak only a few words, but they are ever present, from beginning to end, and they should not be ignored. Like these people in this story, the film is begging us not to be inured to the suffering of these people, as we go back to our endless liking and scrolling past every mention of asylum seeking or genocides being carried out, and all we hear about is how walls need to be thicker and higher, and borders need to be more murderous than porous.

They’re people. We know they’re people, and we convince ourselves otherwise, so that we don’t have to think about it or feel the least bit bad about them as they end up in refugee camp limbo, in indefinite or offshore detention or are forced back to the hells they are trying to escape from.

This film is about all that, all of that, but it’s also about people’s souls. It pricks the conscience, as it should, so it’s not a fun night out at the movies. But I never thought it would be anything other than what it is: a grim, sad look at how some people do what they can, and others do less than nothing, and that, no, things don’t work out for everyone in the end, except for the ones that can escape.

8 times behind the haystacks way more death and far less sex is happening out of 10

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“Do you no longer fear God?”
- “Should I be the one scared of God, Stergios?” - Behind the Haystacks

https://youtu.be/KfK_LrAcYpE?si=Bf8cA39o6tWERvyN