Fuck the polis is a film-journey with a double origin, both lived and literary: your own experience and a very recent short story by the Portuguese writer João Miguel Fernandes Jorge. Can you tell us about the (long?) genesis of the film?
Quite long… On the one hand, it stems from my first trip to Greece in 2007—a sort of escape upon hearing that my life was hanging by a thread—it was the medical prognosis. I had always dreamt of going to Greece, so I decided to leave immediately, before it was too late. Years later, in 2019, during a lunch with João Miguel (Fernandes Jorge), I told him a lot about that journey, the extraordinary things that had happened to me… A few months later, he turned up at the Cinematheque with a short story, A Portuguesa. I thought it was amusing—I assumed it was about my film, which has the same title. But no, it was my trip that his story was telling—a blessed lunch! It felt like two rivers meeting. I had always thought that one day I’d make a film based on that 2007 journey. And suddenly, I found myself in a border zone, travelling along the uncertain line between reality and dream. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been moving things from one side to the other, without knowing whether his story or mine was more true.
This is a thoroughly collective film: a group of young people—four boys and one girl—travel with you from island to island. And more than just accompanying you, they help make the film—image, sound, production… How did this little gang come together?
Making a film without knowing exactly what it is or what it will become—especially one so intimately tied to a personal, inner experience—was incredibly difficult for me. But I had faith. I applied for financial support, but the jury didn’t share that faith—they probably had clearer projects to consider… Carlos Muguiro, at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Tabakalera, San Sebastián, said to me: “If you want to shoot, we can lend you equipment.” He gave me a list of sound and image gear and told me to pick what I needed… That was in November 2023, just as I was finishing a residency at the school, where Carlos and Arrate Velasco had invited me. As with the film, I wasn’t sure how to shape my sessions with the group of students—most of them had already made films. I brought in various scattered elements, including the embryo of this film, and laid them out on the table—a short dossier, some texts. Who knows? Perhaps one of them would have a good idea? A Céu Aberto (Under an Open Sky)—that was the working title at the time. The evening before I left San Sebastián, one of the students said to me on the street: “I don’t know what more you’re looking for. You already have everything you need for the film. You just need to make it!” So that’s what I did.
Bingham Bryant said, “OK, I’ve never done this before, but I think I can handle the camera, Maria will help.” João (Sarantopoulos) and Mauro (Soares) were already close collaborators on other projects (O Trio, A Portuguesa). We shot in May. The evening we arrived in Athens, I met Loukianos, an extraordinary being! A few days later, he joined us en route to Delphi…
The film’s temporality is very unusual, as though there were two journeys: the one you (your character) undertake with a group of young people, and another, remembered in fragments. How did you approach this aspect of the film?
Aren’t there three journeys? Because Irma’s journey is—and isn’t—mine. And then there’s ours, the one we made while filming. The places are seen at different times: 2007, 2024. Farantouri’s voice, for me, connects those two time periods.
You combine different formats and image qualities: HD digital footage is punctuated by bursts of Super 8, and also, seemingly, by lower-definition video. This contributes to the film’s temporal texture, but also to its collective dimension, as if we were witnessing the making of the images in real time.
I like that. And for this film, it’s fitting—those flashes, like the stones of the ruins, like the Greek earth itself. Having limited resources encouraged a sort of role-choreography between us, which kept shifting as the shoot progressed. And the Super 8—and its colours—was a pure whim. It always brings us back to another era. A glass-like image, I can’t explain it. Perhaps they’re the images Irma filmed… There’s no logic to these things. Or rather, there is a logic—yes: lack of money, lack of time, and necessity, resourcefulness—we all had to do a bit of everything.
The film is governed by a choreographic principle that literally makes reality, the shots, and the film material dance. There’s choreography within the frame (traditional dances or a ballet of trucks), and the shots themselves dance, through syncopated editing. It produces a joyous, infectious sense of shared delight.
The mythological Geranos dance at the beginning really inspired me, and that image in the film is a beautiful ruin. I thought: this is an ideal vision of the world—seven men and seven women, side by side, forming a rope that coils inwards towards the centre (the descent into the underworld) and then unwinds again in sync with the music (the return to this world, according to legend…).
That dance was also ours on the Cyclades islands, elbow to elbow, until the very last day. A constant sharing –of rooms, tables, cooking, the washing line, suitcases, and equipment—but above all, of an exhausting joy. Greece has that effect on us. There’s a kind of centre there, a kind of light. Without God. Just the light. Of the five of us, I was the only one who had already been to Delos and Delphi. For the others, it was the first time. I’m glad to hear that something of that joy found its way into Fuck the polis.
Illness is a key motif in the film. It is its origin. But it is also, and perhaps above all, a film of convalescence—in the sense of convalescence as a return to, a rediscovery of the world, of the sensory realm, with a renewed intensity. There’s a great vitality to the film.
It’s an attempt to touch the origin—as abstract as that idea may be. To feel the primordial day, before the word. That was the emotion that calmed me when I first set foot in Greece. It doesn’t happen every day, but sometimes you brush up against the sublime truth. It heals the soul, or feeds it: “Truth is not an explanation that destroys the mystery, but a revelation that does it justice.” That’s what I read this morning when I opened a book I bought yesterday by Mónica Baldaque, The Houses in the Life of Agustina—it’s a quote from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. I don’t have epiphanies, it’s not that—and I’m not looking for them either. I wanted to tell a story—not because it was mine. I pushed vanity as far away as I could, so as not to spoil a story that might reveal the memory of love—and with it, the encounter of beings and things. And of cinema.
Fuck the polis: the title is taken from graffiti on a wall, and from a poem by João Miguel Fernandes Jorge. Beyond the play on words, it feels like a farewell to the city—to the political, to the catastrophic present—in favour of shared pleasures, of the beauty and clarity that were and remain Greece’s gift. “Let the world go to ruin—that is the only politics,” said Marguerite Duras—who, like you, filmed lorries beautifully.
Yes, the title comes from Fernandes Jorge, but not from the short story –it’s from a poem heard at the end of the film, Rua Doménikos Theotokopoulos, which ends: “on the wall, in black—fuck the polis”. That poem struck me deeply. As I said, I had other titles in mind—Under an Open Sky, The Bright Island—perhaps to reflect the Greek light. Marguerite Duras—I haven’t seen her film—is probably right. “We are the cancer,” Aki Kaurismäki once said to me, after a joyful screening of La Vie de Bohème. On this journey/film, the idea of light fell apart. The poem by Fernandes Jorge collided head-on with my sense of the world’s collapse and agony. Before filming, I read a report by the French Academy in Athens that gave me chills: in 50 years, Delos will be submerged—largely due to over-tourism in Mykonos. It’s true!
Throughout the film, in the green-blue-grey-white palette of the Greek islands, bright red flashes insistently return –poppies, heightened through grading. Are these the poppies of Monet, or of Godard? The first ones appear just after the word “justice” is spoken. Or is it simply red?
Poppies are the colour of blood. I wasn’t thinking of Godard or Monet. The first time I went to Delphi, the ground was covered in poppies, birds were high in the sky, bees were buzzing… Now all of that has dried up—like the Castalian spring. In the film, the poppies appear when we speak of Socrates’ death—the first man killed for his sense of justice.
At one point, the story opens up to a key figure and voice of contemporary Greek culture: singer Maria Farantouri. You and your group stop at her house, and the encounter is magical. Can you tell us about her—about meeting the voice first, then the person, and how both found their place in the film?
Meeting Maria Farantouri protected me from the desolation I was feeling at the end of the shoot. My heart was breaking. I had heard her on the night I first arrived in Athens in 2007—without knowing who she was. But that’s a long story…
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
