‘Fuck The Polis’ review: FIDMarseille winner is a personal, lyrical portrait of modern Greece

Dir: Rita Azevedo Gomes. Portugal. 2025. 74mins

A misty voyage across the Greek islands turns into a celebration of magnificence and the pure world in Fuck The Polis. A brusque, confrontational title conceals a poetic, impressionistic documentary from director Rita Azevedo Gomes reflecting her love of Greece and what really feel more and more like bygone values. Esoteric and dauntingly private, the movie could also be a tricky promote however successful FIDMarseille’s worldwide competitors grand prix ought to present it with a foothold on the competition circuit.

An intimate love letter to Greece

Fuck The Polis takes its title from graffiti scrawled on a wall in Athens, and from a poem by Gomes’s good friend Joao Miguel Fernandes Jorges that’s heard on the finish of the movie. It serves as a stark distinction to what may as soon as have adorned a public constructing, and in addition alerts a slipping of the moorings of modernity. There may be actually a way of longing within the movie for higher days and nobler instincts.

Late within the piece, Gomez supplies the background story to Fuck The Polis. In 2007, when she obtained a ”very unpromising medical prognosis”, she left hospital and acquired a ticket to Greece. It was a dream journey, taken underneath the darkish cloud of her personal mortality. Now Gomez has returned, 17 years later and seemingly hale and hearty. She is accompanied by three males and a lady who’re solely recognized on the very finish of the movie as filmmaker Bingham Bryant, actor Mauro Soares, sound recordist Joao Sarantopoulos and director Maria Novo.

The group sail across the islands, and blend HD digital pictures with Tremendous 8 footage as they seize the serene calm of landscapes steeped in historical past. Ruined temples and pale statues communicate to the grandeur of the previous. Magnificence nonetheless lies in a swaying area of blood-red poppies, the bleached, scrubby hillsides and the colourful blues of the ocean. They have the benefit of the easy issues, from a sport of chess in a bar to lounging in a area and studying poetry. There may be not one of the stress and bustle of recent dwelling in these pictures, emphasising how the filmmaker appears to view Greece as a spot of solace and therapeutic.

Reflecting on previous and current visits by Gomes, Fuck The Polis additionally recounts Jorges’ quick story A Portugusa, a fictionalised model of Gomes’s experiences that’s recounted at size within the movie. Studying and the written phrase are a key part of the documentary because the central group recite tales to one another, typically in {couples}. That features poems by Keats and Byron and excerpts from Albert Camus’ post-war essay ’Helen’s Exile’, by which he talks of a misplaced connection to magnificence and nature that’s to the detriment of the fashionable world.

Lengthy static pictures of people posed for the digicam or absorbed within the acts of studying and listening add to the movie’s languorous tempo and obvious want to decelerate the world. In addition they contribute to a way of the movie as a collaborative effort, cast as all of them explored and immersed themselves within the islands of Syros, Mykonos and Delos.

Obscure in locations and never all the time simple to understand, Fuck The Polis emerges finally as an intimate love letter to Greece and what it embodies for Gomes. She options conventional Greek dancing from a public efficiency in 2018 and remembers her first evening in Athens in 2007 when she managed to attend a sold-out live performance that includes singer Maria Farantouri. A reunion with the performer spans the a long time, and is an emotional spotlight of a posh, digressive work.