Giannaris is a diasporic filmmaker, born in Australia to a Greek family in 1959. At a young age he moved to Greece and studied finance and philosophy in 1976 at the universities of Keele and Birmingham respectively. In 1982 he displayed his initial preoccupation with filmmaking36. His career as a filmmaker began in the United Kingdom with a number of short films. Giannaris' first, Jean Genet is Dead (1989), is indicative of his visceral fascination with homosexuality and masculinity that pervade his entire oeuvre. His is a forty minute film about love in the time when AIDS was an alarming issue in the United Kingdom which saw also a criminalization of homosexuality (Terzis, 2011). In the film's voice over one can hear recited poems of Jean Genet that reinforce its statement for tolerance.
Giannaris' first full length feature is the television film 3 Steps to Heaven (1995) that was subsidized by the British Film Institute (BFI) and Channel 437. The film is comprised of a British cast and established the director's reputation in Greece. Giannaris was a passionate devotee of Derek Jarman whom he regards as his mentor (Terzis, 2011). His identity as a director was indeed shaped at the time by the space that British television and British cinema facilitated where Jarman was by any means a controversial and influential figure. Moreover, as a homosexual man, he was given the opportunity to portray his sexual and gender affiliations within the enclaves of a vibrant artistic and cultural movement that promoted such issues and a relative iconography. This was a decisive time in the director's career which enriched his cinematic caché and which he would ultimately "smuggle" into Greece and Greek cinema.
Giannaris began his career as a diasporic filmmaker, of Greek origin, working within the context of British national cinema and television and has progressed to a wider definition of a filmmaker with an international appeal, displaying a multitude of languages and affiliations, through a personal representation of migration and difference, in the era of migration. His films, European and transnational coproductions, are certainly not entirely national but moreover situated in the interstices of the national and the transnational since he ultimately evokes national identity and belonging as departure points to something more inclusive. In the words of Naficy, Giannaris is "situated but [also] universal" (2001: 10).
36http://www.epohi.gr/kersanidis (URL not available).
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His status as a purely Greek filmmaker is questioned by his mixed nationality and cosmopolitan features conveyed through his films per se and diverse cinematic and cultural affiliations. Giannaris is one of many diasporic filmmakers that emerged after the second half of the twentieth century in an increasingly globalized world (Kerr, 2010), inhabiting different national cinemas. An increasingly globalized world and cultural circuit facilitates greater movement, in other words transnational migration and cultural exchange. According to Paul Kerr (ibid.), a result of globalization is the increased emergence and popularity of film festivals that facilitate and encourage cultural exchange. Indicative of this is Giannaris' popularity in Europe and the United States. In 2011, his short films, entitled Shards ("Thravsmata"), lasting in total over three hours (Zoumpoulakis, 2012), were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and presented by the museum's curator, Laurence Kardish38. Before this, his short film North of Vortex (1991), with a Greek and British cast, was screened at the Tate Modern Gallery in London for the "Time Zones" exhibition in 2004. This is also where the first public screening of Hostage took place, on November twelfth 200439.
Giannaris is thus situated and at the same time extends borders and the particularities of any given national establishment, as he has an increased movement and awareness of difference, alterity and of his own foreignness which makes him moreover appealing to non-Greek audiences, cultural institutions and festival circuits. His cultural and national affiliations establish an impure gaze and register particularly since these are "smuggled" and "mixed" with more particular national and local features.
According to Hall (1994: 192) "diaspora speaks in our own name, of ourselves and from our own experience" which however is not the case here since, in Britain, Giannaris is implicated in all things British and speaks in "our name" only once he discovers his niche in Greece. As a novice filmmaker, Giannaris is a member of a certain avant garde elite of British cinema which at the time launched various challenges towards the political establishment and national cinema through a radical politics of representation and formal experimentation. In this respect Giannaris "speaks" not in favour of a Greek identity and experience but of a more universal and simultaneously personal experience that shifts from the restrictions of nationhood, establishing a register that cannot be entirely classified, particularly since it shifts from one position of enunciation to another as the director moves from one homeland to another and portrays shifting and new connections. As a director
38http://www.parathyro.com/?p=6090 Last accessed 27 June 2014. 39
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with more than one homeland, which may simultaneously suggest no homeland at all, one cannot examine the filmmaker and his work as entirely national. While the transnational model seems more fitting, this would be a prescription of a title which is still tightly knit and binding. For this reason one needs to consider the various degrees of difference and alterity in the director's background and films which suggest that his identity "lives with and through, not despite, difference, by hybridity" (Hall, 1990: 222). Arguably, what is at once universal and also situated, slips easily through the cracks and cannot be cohesively classified. This is yet another source of frustration in film studies which nevertheless facilitates greater inclusion.
In 1995 Giannaris returned to Greece where he continued filmmaking and established his reputation. His films, despite obvious departures from a national cinema, concern all things Greek: the repatriated diaspora of the Black Sea region to its alleged homeland, the encounter of the nation with migrant populations, the lives of diasporas and migrants in Athens and the disintegration of the Greek family. His films challenge the foundations of the Greek nation but implicitly concern these very issues which are national concerns although, arguably, concerns of migrants as well. Arguably, the transformation of Greece to a host of immigrants is one of the most controversial concerns of the Greek state and populace and it evokes the nation and its unity. A film which challenges the former, while also placing itself in the contemporary sphere of social and political upheaval brought by migration in Greece, is a national film, despite any departures from the more exclusive frameworks of national cinema which is to say that a film can be national without these exclusive features that dictate citizenship and belonging. After all, transnational does not exclude national.
Nevertheless, as Giannaris has revealed40, his experience of life in Greece has only heightened his alterity since, very much like his mentor, he is an internal exile who certainly is Greek but does not feel that he belongs in and to a country and culture that criminalizes migration and homosexuality. It comes as no surprise then that Giannaris has been leading initiatives for Gay Pride in Athens and for an awareness of queer cinema (Kiriakos, 2001: 120). At the same time, he is implicated in the increasingly alarming violations against immigrants and refugees in Athens, showing openly his support to them and literally fighting Golden Dawn supporters in the streets risking his own life (Saklampanis, 2010). He does not hesitate to express that he sees himself as a stranger in a strange land who therefore identifies with immigrants and their plight (Terzis, 2011;
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Adamidis & Likourgou, 2005). He refers to the violence and the various initiatives of the state in 2011, such as the erection of a concrete wall on the northern border, as a "new apartheid" and a "modernization of Greek racism" (Saklampanis, 2010).
Conclusively, it comes as no surprise that Giannaris sees a reflection of his own oppression in the multitude of oppressed migrants (Adamidis & Likourgou, 2005). One may argue that the director's films are "an aesthetic response to the experience of displacement[...]" (Naficy, 2001: 10) which is certainly not far from the truth but contrary to what Naficy claims in relation to diasporic filmmakers, Giannaris does not occupy an interstitial location in national circles of film production, subsidy and appreciation. He does after all figure highly in the "quality" rankings of film critics and festivals while the controversy surrounding Hostage and Giannaris' gesturing to the committee of the State Awards of Quality have made him notorious.
Giannaris discusses the various alarming social phenomena of Greece, articulating diverse identities from a distance, as a foreigner, and, at the same time, immersed in Greek culture and society. His own identity has been molded by the experience of emigration and homosexuality, as individual sites of identification and struggle, and, while he articulates Greek national identity, he reserves a certain distance as a nomad, a man with more than one homeland and diverse affiliations that bleed into his films. According to the classification that Naficy (2001: 4) has proposed, we can argue that Giannaris' films, where "strangers" are the protagonists, are indicative of an accented cinema, a cinema that has in other words a certain "accent", different from the mainstream of Greek cinema and which emerges through patterns of difference. This difference stems from the radically diverse identities on display in the films that speak of an experience that is alien to "our name" and the director's foreign affiliations.
The cinemas of exilic and diasporic filmmakers emerge from a diverse cultural input and are characterized by hybridity since accented filmmakers "speak" from a position that is in and beyond the language, culture and identity of the homeland and extend their output to the general public, as much as to the fractured collective of the diaspora. Moreover, as Hall has discussed, diasporic identities perpetually produce and reproduce themselves anew marking thus a continuously shifting cinema that sees diasporic filmmakers push the borders of national cinema outward facilitating a greater degree of inclusiveness by "smuggling" difference - the foreign accent that is manifest in form, thematics and the overall cultural and creative context of a film (1990: 222).
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Naficy essentially highlights the notion of difference as embedded within representation, mirroring the diasporic identity of the director. In other words, the director's alterity is an authorial signature. Therefore, an accented film like Hostage stands out because it reflects the foreign identity of its director and its various affiliations that reveal how he is also a stranger in Greece.
What is very challenging and worth mentioning here is that Hostage extends to a fractured collective indeed, but not a diasporic Greek community, on the contrary, the Albanian community, in and beyond Albania, a country that has seen generations of men in exile. In other words, if we were to speak of a diasporic cinema in terms of Hall's meditations, then Giannaris' is an entirely new diasporic cinema. Moreover, it is a "cinema of duty" (Malik, 1996), which highlights the plight of a foreign community in the director's indigenous community, doing quite the opposite of what Malik and Naficy suggest, becoming in a way an ambassador for Albanians in Greece, although he is not Albanian or indeed an immigrant per se. Nevertheless, the film not only appeals but moreover is almost forcefully directed to the Greek nation, one that allegorically comes to life inside the bus and outside asserting thus that the imagined community is tangible. Accented cinema in this respect does not account for the diversity inherent in the background and films of Giannaris as much as for the least accented features.
It is important that we consider this discussion on the filmmaker's background. On the one hand it is a popular argument in film studies that we need to consider numerous other issues that are intrinsically linked to films and which reinforce a holistic debate on cinema not merely as a an artistic product but as an overall cultural artifact and outlet. On the other, the background of a film and filmmaker are inevitably embedded in the films per se and therefore need to be considered for an inclusive textual analysis. The elusive features of Giannaris highlight the pleasures of transnationalism and suggest that, in a globalised world, existing systems of classification fall short and that we need to rely further on hybridity and the interplay between fixed identities and homelands, difference and diaspora which require greater unpacking rather than classification. Giannaris' interview to myself41, where he reveals that he wished to make with Hostage "a film about us, his own experience as a pariah, a film about the body of the immigrant but also a bit of a thriller and drama in the style of Sindey Lumet" exposes this hybridity that permeates both form and theme and reveals a cinema that cannot be classified entirely as Greek and which is an example of the hybridity of transnational films.
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3.1.2 The hostage situation and its aftermath
Hostage is based on actual events that took place on 28 May 1999 in Northern Greece (Spirou, 2011: 10). A 25 year old Albanian immigrant, Flamur Pisli, hijacked an intercity bus going from Kato Scholari, a semi-industrial village in Thessaloniki, to the south. The event began to draw increasing attention as Pisli demanded that television channels document the entire event. He demanded as ransom 50,000,000 drachmas and that the police reveal the existence of three Kalashnikov guns that were planted in his work space, a construction site on his employer's estate. Pisli insisted that he was framed by his employer, the local police chief who sought illegal arms dealings with him and who sent Pisli to detention, where he was beaten and sexually abused (Papailias, 2003: 1060). The journey ended in Albania where Albanian police snipers shot down Pisli and George Koulouris, a Greek passenger. During the hostage situation, television channels and police forces formed a convoy following the bus, documenting the event and negotiating with Pisli. The trajectory of the event was broadcast primarily by Antenna TV and the reporter and newscaster Nikos Evangelatos, a popular television persona at the height of his career and popularity.
This was one of two significant hostage situations in the late 1990s that was documented in its entirety with live broadcasts by television channels and reporters who sought to exploit the situation in order to increase their ratings by endorsing a populist rhetoric that criminalizes immigration. The news program of Evangelatos reproduced nine times in three minutes the scene of Koulouris' corpse creating a sinister atmosphere overriding fear and hatred, drawing on sensationalism and the popular image of an Albanian as criminal getting "what he deserved" (Konstantinidou, 2001: 99; Spirou, 2011: 25).
The aftermath of the tragic incident saw twenty one articles published in various newspapers including Ta Nea (29/5/1999), Kathimerini (29/5/1999, cited in Spirou, 2011: 35-36) and Eleftherotypia (29/5/1999 and 2/6/1999, cited in Mini, 2006: 74). In these articles, Pisli is mentioned as "the Albanian" ("o Alvanos") as well as on television channels, particularly the news, where reporters are keen on referring to immigrant criminals, or suspected immigrants, by mentioning their nationality. They thus establish Albanophobia, additionally by using dramatic music and irrelevant archival footage of crime scenes, demonizing the Albanian (Kapplani, 2010: 91-92).
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The hostage situation and the lack of resourcefulness of the Greek police forces reflected on a hostage incident that happened in Athens in 1998. In this other case, a Greek family was taken hostage in a tenement flat by a Romanian immigrant, Sorin Matei. The sting operation of the Greek police, that happened more than twenty four hours later resulted in the death of a young Greek woman and a disgraced national police force that had made very risky calculations regarding the hand grenade that Matei was holding and threatening to detonate. After the hijacking of the bus and the death of Koulouris, the Greek press wrote about the hijacking as a "parody of the Matei incident" (Kathimerini, Eleftherotypia 29/5/1999, cited in Spirou, 2011: 36). The very next day, police forces in Athens, following orders by the Prime Minister Costas Simitis, initiated a sweep operation of Albanian immigrants, documented and clandestine, setting off a diplomatic conflict with Albania, a representative of whom declared that Greece was exploiting the hostage situation as an excuse to deport immigrants. Penelope Papailias interprets this initiative as "an attempt [of Greece] to deflect attention from its responsibilities" (2003: 1061). This conflict was resolved quickly without further collateral damage revealing nevertheless the intensity of Greek-Albanian relations and their nationalistic background as the hijacking confirmed the growing public sentiment that both countries must sharply define their borders (ibid.: 1060). Moreover, one may draw in this case from Isaiah Berlin's insight on the definition of nationalism. Berlin argues that "nationalism is an inflamed manifestation of nationhood, which is triggered by a form of collective humiliation" (1990: 245). The feeling of humiliation emerging from the thought that the Greek state is unable to protect its people and that the national police force is incapable of serving its role of protecting Greeks, undeniably brings with it the seeds of nationalism and xenophobia. This is true particularly when the sentiments of humiliation are perceived as collective, a task that the media implement to the fullest extent. It thus seems as no coincidence that in the following years, a ministry for "the protection of citizens" ("Ipourgio Prostasias tou Politi") was established.
For two years, the Albanian government did not acknowledge that Koulouris was shot by Albanian snipers, despite footage from Reuters. Following the sweep operation ordered by the Simitis government, the Albanian foreign minister, Paskal Milo, threatened to flood Northern Epirus with Albanian refugees from Kosovo, who were descending to Albania during NATO bombing operations in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia.
The hijacking and the death of Koulouris were still flaming issues in 2005 when Hostage was released in cinemas (Spirou, 2011: 40) while Albanians were still regarded as
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a threat to national sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity. Albanophobia was still a critical issue affecting the lives of Albanian immigrants and defining the overall attitude of Greeks towards Albanians.
This was a ubiquitous phenomenon as the state of affairs was underlined by populist sentiments regarding Greeks and Albanians. In 1998, the state proceeded to new measures regarding an ongoing modernisation of the country (Spirou, 2011: 15). This included among other things agreeing to a European currency. The archbishop Christodoulos, a significant figure who influenced political decisions and who fought against secularism was elected, while the country was preparing to host the 2004 Olympic Games. However, the increasingly growing numbers of undocumented immigrants and various headlines of newspapers stirred mass panic that seemed inappropriate at the time of modernisation. Headlines included "300% increase in the sale of alarms" (Kathimerini, 14/3/1998), "terror has spread in the city" (Kathimerini, 15/3/1998) while rightist newspapers Eleftheros Typos and Eleftheros blamed Albanians and clandestine immigrants overall for increased crime rates (cited in Konstantinidou, 1999: 125). Ethnos very obviously demonizes "Albanians": "The people are distraught as yet another bus has been hijacked by an Albanian gangster. The Greek people demand that these phenomena cease since they endanger innocent civilians" (To Ethnos, 1/6/1999) while according to Avriani "Greece is at the mercy of Albanian criminals" (1/6/1999). Moreover, the then Minister of