By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/14/23 – On Sunday evening, the Greek Film Festival Los Angeles had a special screening of a new Greek film Behind the Haystacks (Píso apo tis thimonies, 2022) at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Normandie Avenue in DTLA. Behind the Haystacks is a dramatic feature film directed by Asimina Proedrou as her directorial debut.
The film tells the story of a middle-aged fisherman who, faced with mounting debt, begins to smuggle refugees across Doiran Lake on Greece’s northern border with North Macedonia. The story takes place in 2015 during the period when several European countries had closed their borders, resulting in hundreds of Syrian refugees and immigrants being trapped near the northern borders of Greece.
In Behind the Haystacks, the middle-aged fisherman named Sterios (Stathis Stamoulakatos) living on the border of Greece near Dorian Lake finds himself in deep debt. He begins trafficking immigrants across the border at night, in exchange for a large sum. His wife Maria (Eleni Ouzounidou), a housewife and devout parishioner, is suspicious of her husband’s doings and seeks to find out the truth about money he suddenly has acquired. Meanwhile her daughter Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda) attempts to define her own life in an oppressive familial environment.
Then a tragic incident hits the family, pushing the three members of this Greek family to confront their own impasses and personal weaknesses, while having to consider, for the first time in their lives, the price to pay for their actions.
Proedrou developed Behind the Haystacks while studying long distance for an MA in filmmaking at the UK’s Staffordshire University in collaboration with Raindance Film School, all the while maintaining her job working for a metallurgy company. Divided into three chapters, the film centers on a father, a mother and their daughter as they are faced with moral challenges brought on by the refugee crisis.
They live on the Greek side of Doiran Lake, the expanse that separates Greece from North Macedonia and where refugees attempt the crossing.
“I wanted to tell a story about how society puts a lot of pressure on people,” says Proedrou, “how their relationships are formed, and how they submit to corrupt structures.”
Behind the Haystacks examines how the repercussions of a single, tragic event ripple outward across a community, forcing many to consider the costs of their actions for the first time.
Proedrou described the journey of her long-gestating directorial debut, which began on a trip to northern Greece in 2015, at the height of a crisis that saw some 1.3 million refugees — mostly Syrians fleeing war — attempt to gain safe passage into Europe. Many arrived in Greece before attempting to travel further north.
Already developing a social drama set in the region, the director and her team were location scouting when they encountered a family of refugees staying in a local hotel. The experience inspired Proedrou to examine how Greece’s growing humanitarian crisis was adding to the strains of a rural community already facing pressure from larger economic and social forces.
The central events are examined from three different points of view, in a way that emotionally evokes the sensibility of The Place Beyond the Pines rather than a stricter Kurosawa Rashomon narrative. Of course, one cannot talk about the film without making extensive reference to the innovation of its narrative development;
Told in three parts, Behind the Haystacks examines how those forces combined with the refugee crisis to create a combustible mix — most notably in the form of the fisherman, Stergios, who finds himself getting entangled in a disastrous human-smuggling ring to dig his family out of a financial hole. “One decision follows the other, and at some point, he’s trapped,” explained Proedrou.
That Stergios is emotionally controlling is evident in the way Maria scurries about in his presence. Anastasia is also outwardly obedient. He treats her more like a child than the young woman she is, insisting on driving her nursing job at the hospital and refusing to let her go for a night out in nearby Kiklis without a chaperone.
He intensely dislikes his brother-in-law (Paschalis Tsarouhas) for historic reasons that, ironically, also lead him to becoming involved in a nefarious scheme to transport refugees across the lake. This latest enterprise is, unfortunately for Stergios, not the only thing that won’t end well for him.
Proedrou then takes a different tack, to consider the situation through the eyes of the devoutly religious Maria. The one area of her life where she could be considered to have power is in her local Greek Orthodox Church, where she is trusted by the priest to keep the keys to the place for cleaning duties and to organize the collection for restoration funds. She finds it hard to tread the church line that it is “sinful to help” the refugees, however, when she is confronted with their harsh reality.
The third chapter, centering on Anastasia’s gradual rebellion from her father unfolds, like the others, in elliptical fashion, occasionally brushing on moments we have already seen while filling in the blanks more generally. A nursing student by day who harbors dreams of becoming a cabaret singer by night, Anastasia spends the bulk of the film trying to define herself against the constrictive society around her – or to find a way out. It’s a canny move by Proedrou who keeps us on the hook and fishing for clues as the full picture finally pulls into focus with a satisfying snap.
Few of her characters are spared the director’s critical gaze, from local religious and business leaders to Stergios’ wife, Maria, whose outwardly charitable designs toward the area’s refugees mask her own restless social climbing – and the chilling hypocrisy that comes to the surface at a pivotal moment in the film.
While each of her protagonists faces a stark moral reckoning, it is the couple’s daughter, Anastasia, who offers a glimpse of salvation, as she see her at the film’s end planning to leave the small farming village behind.
The eerie location of the filming (Lake Doiran on the northern border of Greece) is used to perfection by Praedrou. The same setting accompanies three chapters of very different aura, with the despair of the defeated male, the gradual awakening of the wife and the rapid coming of age of the daughter surrounded by a landscape of solidified fear and permanent crisis.
Elaborate in its development but completely clear in its concept of story-telling, Behind the Haystacks is a fine example of Greek cinema and was chosen as Greece’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Oscars.