Diorthosi

When Yorgos is released from prison in his early thirties,an odyssey opens up for him somewhere between past and present. He takes his first, uncertain steps in freedom into an almost hostile Athens that keeps him at a distance. A city that mutely screams at him and in which he searches for some connection to the time before his imprisonment. The young woman with her daughter who he spots on the street and then spies on, were they once his family? Both mother and daughter remain unreachable, instead the wrong friends from his past come back into his life: football hooligans with their nationalist slogans who thank Yorgos for not having “betrayed” them. Together with the spectator, Yorgos comes across a clue to the secret of his past. Using neo-realist austerity and shying away from sentimentality, Thanos Anastopoulos narrates his protagonist’s restlessness. The middle class has moved away from the neighborhood that he has returned to, making room for an urbanity of little people made up of a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds, giving rise to a new kind of equality. Yorgos’s futile search for inner peace becomes an unpretentious study of milieu in society, of carefully maintained everyday routines behind which lurk social tensions and national resentment.
Bernd Buder