Photo: Simela Pantzartzi

Impossible Biographies

  • September 9, 2013

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City & Commons

The latest short documentary by the ‘City at a Time of Crisis’ research project portrays the harrowing plight of Greece’s besieged migrant community.

Many years before the first clouds of the crisis would hover over the greek skies, amidst greek society’s most glorious of moments and its most mundane of days, the lives and labour of migrants would be faced with their meticulous devaluation.

For them, the crisis has by now come of age. Yet despite and against shallow journalistic interpretations, there is nothing humanitarian about it. This is because for them, the crisis was from the upstart orchestrated politically, socially and militarily. In this way, the discourse about racism in crisis-ridden Greece merely obfuscates and comes in handy, for it obscures exactly how structural this devaluation had been for the development of the Greek state in itself, as well as for the self-perception of Greek society.

Yet the crisis knows how to twist meanings too. Today, migrants are accused of the very decline of the Greek edifice. And within this twisted world, their devaluation takes on a more offensive and, at the same time, a more legitimate form. Impossible Biographies, as part of the research project The City at a Time of Crisis, bears witness to this offensive.

Today, just like yesterday, the devalued lives of migrants shall remind us how it is to live and die within an enforced anonymity and invisibility. How it is to live a life whose biography is impossible.

Ross Domoney

Ross Domoney is an award-winning independent documentary maker and video journalist. He focuses on non-presenter lead, observational filmmaking about political struggles from around the world. He also produces documentary films that are often character lead. Ross has worked in Syria, Turkey, Ukraine and the DR Congo, to name a few.

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Source URL — https://roarmag.org/films/impossible-biographies/

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