Acclaimed Greek Australian film director Jason Raftopoulos’s new film, Voices in Deep, will make its debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival this week, 16-17 August.
The film is set in the aftermath of Greece’s refugee crisis in 2015-16, when almost one million people crossed its border from Turkey. The film tells two separate stories that briefly intersect and are tied by theme. The first story focuses on two orphaned refugee brothers, who arrive in Greece by boat. The older brother becomes a sex worker to secure housing and food for himself and his younger brother.
The second story focuses on an Australian aid worker, traumatised by the humanitarian crisis who must quickly sell illegally obtained shellfish to get home.
In 2018, Raftopoulos’s first feature film, West of Sunshine, starring the late Damian Hill, won the Jury Grand Prix Award for Best Film at the Festival des Antipodes in Saint Tropez, and Best Director at the Barcelona International Film Festival.
He was also nominated for Best Director by the Australian Directors Guild and nominated for Best Independent Film by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.
Raftopoulos grew up in East Doncaster and Park Orchards before moving to New York in the 90s where he spent most of his 20s and early 30s.
He now lives in Prahran. He wrote Voices in Deep, with fellow filmmaker Alkinos Tsilimidos.
Jason spoke with Anna Bourozikas about his new film. Below is an edited version of that interview.
I have seen a few films in recent years, by Greek filmmakers focusing on the experience of migrants and refugees living in Greece, what attracted you to that theme as a Greek Australian?
I, like everyone else, saw those images coming out of Greece in 2015-2016 and was completely affected by those images. What I sensed being here and being so far away was this sense of powerlessness that overcame me, and that there was nothing that you could do. As a son of a migrant, of course I am sensitive to that idea, my father being an unaccompanied teenager when he came post WWII, so it is kind of in our story. The Greek Australian story is a migrant story, it’s an escape to a better kind of life story. When I saw those images, it made me reflect on my parent’s story and mainly it was a reaction to the sense of powerlessness I felt.
Many Greek Australians create work that references their Greek Australian identity, but from what I have seen of your work so far, you have steered clear of that, is that a conscious decision?
All my work feels personal. And this one also. Identity is an interesting word. We have a foot in both worlds as a Greek Australian. We have a foot in the Australian world and we have a foot in the Greek world and I feel we are constantly moving between those two worlds. I don’t consciously make work that is Greek or not Greek but thematically I think it has got a lot of Greek overtones. My stories all feel personal to me.
Your two feature films have concentrated on outliers, why is that? (laughs)
I don’t why I do that. I’m drawn to characters that we don’t see. I am just trying to open a door to a world we don’t often see.
Did you make a conscious effort to show the modern multiculturalism of Athens?
Yes. It was really important to me to get a sense that Athens was full of all kinds of people and especially given that Athens itself was a melting pot of people and it being a place of people movement for centuries. To make this film feel kind of timeless, I felt it was important to put those faces in front of a camera.
What kind of feedback have you had from Greece as a Greek Australian telling this Greek story?
The feedback from the few people that have seen it, is that they have never seen Athens shot that way. There was a nice surprise as to someone from outside Athens being able to come in and shoot it in a way that was new. I was trying to find locations that one, suited the story, and two, weren’t traditional clichés of what Athens could be.
Do you think it is harder to be a refugee in Greece or Australia?
My view is we don’t have a crisis here in Australia which is why I chose Greece to tell this story. The crisis didn’t really occur here. There was a political outcry that there was a crisis but that was more political ineptitude. I think the crisis happened in Europe and especially in Greece. I know mistakes were made and there has been a lot of tragedy, but (the film) is not a criticism of Greece. I don’t know where it is worse, I just don’t think we had a problem here and the way we treated the people that came was shameful.
One of the things I noticed in the film is the lack of reaction shots.
I had a very specific idea of how I wanted to shoot the film and the reason I didn’t shoot any close ups was because I wanted all these characters just to be a product of their environment, so there are a lot of wide shots. I wanted the characters to be fully in the world, to be weighed down by the world, so there were no close ups of human faces at all, and that was the intention as a visual language. It creates the feeling of watching from a distance which is the experience of watching this on the news and being distant from the images and the people. That’s right. Part of this meta narrative is that we see this world but we are unattached to it.
*Screenings for the MIFF screening have sold out but the film will be screening during the Greek Film Festival in October with a wider theatre release planned later in the year.
