Synopsis
Today there is an identity crisis that prevails over the economic one.
It is about separation, disorientation.
European cultures have been sold off to standardized consumption and the race to get rich.
They have made us believe that freedom from material poverty should coincide with escaping from ourselves.
Reliving poverty today, without us being self-conscious, is an unbearable instability.
Our documentary consists of time cut out to listen to our absence. It is the awareness that we live with a debt of air, meaning and perspective.
In order to make it, we roamed around like flaneurs, like wanderers in a symbolic place of the crisis - indebted Greece – following the words, thoughts and music of the rebetes, the singers of rebetiko, a kind of Hellenic blues.
Rebetiko music originated in the despair of an old crisis (Greeks fleeing Smyrna) and is one of the musical forms that has built Greece’s modern identity, conveying both the pain of exile and the rebellion against the violence of history. It is an unauthorised and unlawful music that opposes power.
Rebetes are the bearers of this identity, who today celebrate a funeral full of defeat, desperate rebellion and silent hope.
Their concerts and their words fill the taverns in Athens and Salonica at night, they graze the writing on the walls, they listen to the sea in the harbours and cross the path of Vinicio Capossela, a musician and wanderer who weaves his notes with thoughts from his travel diary, the tefteri.
So Greece becomes Europe, its crisis becomes ours and rebetiko becomes the living song of an indebted and desperate hope.
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