Rogatsia, the Sense of Zourna (2015), dir. Yiannis Koufonikos

Screening with Q&A with director Yiannis Koufonikos

Rogatsia has been a long time in the making for Koufonikos. Shot over four years from 2005-09, and after several years of editing, it is now in a finished form of sorts. During the Q&A, he mentioned that he intends to develop it further into an interactive documentary, presenting the 20+ hours of material shot in a more malleable, online form.

Learning about Greek folk culture is interesting, yet also not the type of thing I would usually be interested in. However, there is also a sense that there is nothing that compares to actually being there. The ancient instruments and men in white tights stands as anachronous in the face of modern cars, and people standing outside their houses in plastic coats. I’ve seen traditional folk costumes and music parade down the street in Salzburg, yet never in Greece. Koufonikos said that the people featured in the documentary seemed to enjoy it the most; it took his grader a couple of viewings for it to grow on him. You can understand why. To live and breathe among these people is a different experience entirely. But there’s something interesting about a New Year celebration so far apart from ours: children beg to drink wine, but there’s no drunken make-out sessions complete with fireworks and champagne (or Jools Holland).

In presenting his ethnographic study as an audio-visual artefact, it brings to life the traditional costumes and the music in a way prose would not be able to capture. Shot on handheld digital video, the detriments of this become most apparent during sequences with strong light sources – we see light streams in the church, and in another scene flares from the sun light up dust from the lens and in some ways distracts. Koufonikos responded to my question, saying that he was willing to sacrifice the image in order to capture a greater objectivity.

Koufonikos acknowledges his presence within the documentary: a child asks why he is being filmed, and a man wishes him to make the best documentary he can. There is no theatricality, but a sense of capturing reality as it happens. To see an ethnographic documentary like this feels unusual in the present day; where I think of a documentary capturing a culture in an ‘objective’ light, I think of works of the 1920s and 30s, like Man of Aran (1934) and Nanook of the North (1922), but Koufonikos told me that many parts of the former were staged. Other recent works such as The Pearl Button (2015) depend upon beautiful cinematography, rather than this more restrained, minimalistic perspective.

Some of the featured subjects present a sense of character, however it is lacking is context. Zourna went through a cultural resurgence during the 1970s, we are told: however besides a few sentences, this isn’t explored. A greater depth into why this tradition went away and why it came back – and its positive aspects of raising money to build a church – would have been appreciated.

Ida (2013), dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Unfortunately, The Sound of Music (1965) is still regarded as the most iconic film about life as a nun.

Ida’s relationship with her aunt Wanda has the feeling of a feminist buddy cop film: two connected people with distinctive personalities and philosophical differences, yet still with a sense of unity. Ida with a sense of devout Christianity; Wanda with a less devout religious feeling. But the film doesn’t spell this out; its most powerful moments are told in silence, within frames filled with blank space. There’s a sense of distance in the frame; a distance from the viewer; a distance between the characters, perhaps a distance from God. Almost every frame of this film is a photograph in itself, forming a cross – so ubiquitous and so universal, it can be formed of anything – God holding a presence everywhere. Ida doesn’t lose her faith per se, but it does seem to lessen.

She has to reconcile her Christian faith with her Jewish heritage. She survived the war because of her gender and because of her youth. In some ways, it feels a stronger portrait of the Holocaust than a film directly set in Auschwitz. Poland’s Jewish population was decimated during the Second World War. There remain a handful of synagogues, yet the war drastically altered the community, reinforcing Christianity. Even after the war, it remains a hidden identity for Ida, and the local community don’t seem to remember the Jews.

Over the course of the film, Ida becomes more naked, liberated from a very secluded life. The Jewish community spent the war contained within limited physical spaces – ghettos; death camps. This sense of seclusion continues to manifest within other power systems, like the nunnery, even with the war long over. But the frame is also secluding, relying on the contained space of the frame within long shots.

In private, she removes her headdress, to show her beautiful ginger hair – as a viewer, we cannot see this beauty in monochrome, but can hear Wanda’s appreciation of it. Against her earlier refusal, she goes to listen to the live music, and meets a boy who feels attraction to her. Later on, she decides to wear the dress she was once adamant against, showing more flesh. She removes her shoes, until she has both lost her clothes and lost her virginity. She drinks. She becomes the “slut” rather than the “saint”, to use Wanda’s terms – echoing her character. But at the prospect of “life” (normality), she walks away, still as much a nun as she was before.