A closed horizon

The film director Theo Angelopoulos talks to openDemocracy's Jane Gabriel about the turmoil in Greece and about his new film 'The Dust of Time'

Theo Angelopoulos: We have reached a dead end point in the social and political life of Greece; and if we add to this the economic crisis, we find superimposed on each other three parallel crises, social, political and economic. It is a very severe situation. Who suffers from this? Obviously the more vulnerable social and economic classes, but some other groups as well. Who? The young people. Ahead of them there is a closed horizon, there is no reference point, no future prospect: they live in a world where whatever we hear about public life is scandal, corruption, crises, weaknesses and compromises. Young people become tangled up in this story; they feel the full burden and the weight of this story. The result is that without having full consciousness of what is going on, they have a profound need to break out of this shell, and they take to the streets.

The story in Athens now might not have assumed these wide dimensions had there not been an assassination, which I would say - a little ahead of time - brought about an explosion, which otherwise might have taken more time to mature and led to genuine rebellion. My sense is that we have reached what you would call a fin de saison and that there will be a return of these uprisings, which will become ever more frequent. I also believe that this is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon, I have a feeling that this will turn out to be a European wide phenomenon in the future. In contrast to earlier youth uprisings, like May 1968 or the equivalent uprisings in Greece prior to the installation of the junta, which were focussed around specific political demands, at this particular moment there are no specific demands. There is an opposition, it's as if people are waiting in a waiting room and can hear from outside the door all kinds of alarming sounds and noises, and they reach the point when they want to open the door and see what is going on outside.

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