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Run time:
56 min.
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Language:
English and Greek
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color
With the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics just over a year away, forty Gypsy families are forced to abandon their settlement next to the main Olympic stadium so that the land can be used for a parking lot.
The film follows Prokopis Nikolau, a produce vendor who lived his entire life in this settlement, as he struggles to find a new home for himself and his family. The local mayor agreed to pay the Roma rent subsidies in exchange for vacating the land, but the money proves elusive and the families are forced to move from place to place due to evictions and sub-standard living conditions. Prokopis becomes an unofficial spokesman for the forty families, fighting for both their dignity and the money they were promised. He meets with human rights activists, takes his battle with the mayor to the courts, and shares his story with the international media that descend on Athens in the weeks leading up to the Olympic Games. Festivals screened at include: Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival 2006 Istanbul International Documentary Film Festival 2006 Human Rights Doc Days Kiev 2006 Document 4 Glasgow 2006 Planet-in-Focus Toronto 2006 London International Documentary Festival 2007 Montreal Human Rights Film Festival 2007 Human Rights Nights Bologna 2007 New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival 2007 Golden Wheel Film Festival Skopje 2007 Al Jazeera Documentary Festival 2007 |
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Cast & Crew
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Audience Buzz
2,025 people viewed this page
2 people reviewed this film
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9:54 PM
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though I'm not as biased as my wife who's European and grew up living with the Roma's effect on society. I'm appalled at the behavior of the government and how they kept promising things they couldn't deliver on. However, the Roma kept complaining about how little they had yet they were always eating relatively well. They had cell phones, soda, cigarettes and alcohol.
So, while I feel for their plight, I find it hard to take them seriously if they moved from place to place that they didn't own, expect to be granted the rights to the place but didn't pay taxes, pay for electricity or water, etc.
Overall, the doc is well made and worth watching to get a view into one of Europe's largest problems. I would have liked to see more of the other side as well though ...
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