A group of Pontian Greek immigrant teenage dreamers dwelling marginalised in the notorious and lustreless wild suburbia, witness the city's repulsive face and an unrelenting world defined by prostitution, drugs, and inevitably, loss.
From the Edge of the City (1998)
Apo tin akri tis polis (original title)
Από την άκρη της πόλης
Apo tin akri tis polis (original title)
Από την άκρη της πόλης
The “Edge of the City” means Menidi, a poor suburb on the edge of pulsating Athens (the city). Menidi harbours many Cosssack Greeks. They are also called “pontios”, ethnic Greeks from the Black Sea dispersed through the ex-Southern Soviet Union in the Stalin era. The “pontios” have returned to Greece en masse after the demise of the USSR. The parents speak mostly Greek, but the teenage children speak a hybrid Russian-Greek language which reflects their lack of identity and marginalization. The teenagers’ marginalization leads them to the core of the film’s theme: the lives of petty crime and prostitution which these second or third class Greeks lead. Their camaraderie, the way they mock each others’ dealing in homosexuality, their sexual and criminal exploitation by rich Greeks, their own exploitation of prostitutes, sexual and moral ambiguity all lead to the film’s defining.
But Sasha is also a very specific product of his time and place. After the crumbling of the Soviet Union, he and his family were among thousands who emigrated from Kazakhstan to Athens in search of a better life. In feverish flashbacks, Sasha imagines an idyllic boyhood, running with his friends across a golden wheat field. The childhood of his imagination couldn’t be more different from his sleazy late adolescence of prostitution, drugs and gaudy nightclub fantasies.
”From the Edge of the City,” which opens today at the Screening Room, is a deliberately ragged movie that affects a documentary authenticity as it follows Sasha and his friends around Omonia Square in Athens. Every now and then, Sasha is plunked in front of the camera and asked blunt questions about his life and his expectations by an unseen narrator. His tends to respond with defensive, noncommittal shrugs.
FROM THE EDGE OF THE CITY
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