Riot police were deployed in the Greek city of Thessaloniki as a city-wide ban on protests was implemented after two weeks of turmoil in response to a new documentary film and its accompanying “blasphemous” poster.
Those incensed by the film and its poster had previously announced plans to disrupt the premiere of Greek filmmaker Elina Psykou’s “Stray Bodies”. The film’s poster features a bare-breasted pregnant woman nailed to a cross in what appears a hybrid image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus melded into one person, and which has been deemed “blasphemous” by Greek Church officials and conservative political leaders.
The 12 March premiere was preceded by “a fortnight of roiling controversy over the Tribeca-winning director’s documentary debut, which follows the lengths that women in Europe must go to access medical procedures that are outlawed in their own countries”, reportsVariety.
The US entertainment magazine describes the film as showing the stories of women who are denied access to abortion, in-vitro fertilisation and euthanasia in their own countries and must therefore travel across Europe “to undertake the procedures”. The film documents “the physical, emotional and economic tolls of such ‘medical tourism’,” and is, Variety argues, “a scathing indictment of the male-dominated state and religious institutions in Europe that exercise more power over women’s bodies than women themselves”.
Leading up to the premiere, Variety reports, religious groups in Greece’s second largest city circulated a call for an “awakening”, arguing that those involved in the documentary and supporting it “aim to demolish our ancestral values, while urging protesters to gather outside the building hosting the premiere.
On 1 March, Greek parliamentarian Komninos Delveroudis of the right-wing Victory party – which some criticise as being far-right – decried the “provocative, blasphemous and unsightly” poster and said it “openly offends morals, blaspheming the holy symbol of the cross and the holy faces of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary”.
He also called on the government “to restore the criminal provisions for the malicious blasphemy and defamation of religion”.
In response, the Greek Documentary Association criticised the Victory party’s “Taliban mentality” and warned against efforts “to bring back penal provisions which prosecute anyone who dares to express in any way, artistic or political, views which are not to the liking of its self-styled fundamentalist ‘ministers of the Greek people’.”
At the same time, opposition lawmaker Kyriaki Malama of the left-wing Syriza party said that such proclamations from Victory’s “uninvited inquisitor…cannot shake our democratic freedoms”, adding: “To these gentlemen and to the Middle Ages they represent, we reply that we call on the world to be at the screening of the documentary at the Thessaloniki festival to raise a shield of democracy against their dangerous views.”
Variety reports that the measures taken by the city seemed to have the desired effect and demonstrators against the film did not turn up at the premiere. Instead, it notes, a crowd of roughly 200 counter-protesters chanting “death to fascism” turned up in defiance of the public ban, and were eventually marshaled from the scene by several dozen police officers in riot gear.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the premiere, Psykou said she was stunned by the strength of the backlash:
“When we made this poster, we knew that it would provoke some conversation, but we didn’t imagine this kind of reaction,” she said. “With the film, we want to open a dialogue. And we thought, with the poster, we could open a dialogue. But now, there’s no dialogue. There are only monologues.”
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