Amerika Square (Plateia
Amerikis)
(Greece/UK/Germany, 86 min.)
Dir. Yannis Sakaridis, Writ. Yannis Tsirbas, Vangelis
Mourikis, Yannis Sakaridis
Starring: Makis Papadimitriou, Yannis Stankoglou, Vassilis
Kukalani, Ksenia Dania, Alexandros Logothetis, Rea Pediaditaki, Themis Bazaka,
Errikos Litsis
There are many sad stories in the global migration crisis:
deaths, rootlessness, hopelessness, and families torn apart. However, there are
few narratives as distressing as those of people who refuse to accept change
and hold the gates to freedom shut. Borders are closing and fences are going up
to clamp the human flow. The rampant xenophobia inherent in the era is not
humankind’s finest hour.
Just take the case of Nakos (Makis Padadimitriou). Nakos a fat, balding, unemployed white guy who still lives with his parents despite pushing forty years old. He blames the waves of refugees and immigrants inundating Greece for his troubles and his inability to get a job. Nakos thinks the Greeks are outnumbered on their own turf, and Amerika Square begins with the portly anti-hero taking an “us” and “them” tally to gauge the changing population of his beloved Amerika Square. He doesn’t like the results.
Nakos decides to rid the square of perceived vermin with a
sneaky trick: preying upon the appetites of the needy. He acquires some hefty
poison, bakes bread laced with fatal doses, and hides loaves around town for
the newcomers to find. His motivation to cleanse the streets of “undesirables”
in an effort to reclaim the neighbourhood speaks to the racist and xenophobic
NIMBYism of Brexit-era Europe.
Poison baked in bread, however, is a pretty stupid plot hole.
Kneading batch upon batch of fatally toxic dough seems more likely to kill
Nakos through absorption before the buns ever make it out the door. For all its
perceptive intentions, Amerika Square
needs a bit more tinkering in the kitchen with its uneven and often implausible
and unconvincing yarn of anti-migration woes.
Other segments of the film look at the narratives of people
in Nakos’s building and immediate neighbourhood. They feature a mix of native
Greeks and some refugees en route to better lives. These stories are often far
more compelling than Nakos’s is as the film follows refugees like the Syrian
Tarek (Vassilis Kukalani) or Kenyan Tereza (Ksenia Dania) as they submit to a
dangerous human trafficking ring to flee Greece for the more prosperous lands
of Italy and Germany. Tarek’s story is especially compelling as the dangerous
exit strategy divides his family and puts his daughter’s life at risk—a story that
is probably all too common and a highlight among the ham-fisted yarns that
intersect in this drama.
Amerika Square
might be a better film if it gave more attention to the migrants’ struggles
rather than the disenfranchisement of a disillusioned homicidal white guy, but the
film nevertheless speaks to a dangerous mentality that infects entitled folks worldwide.
The film is Greece’s official submission in the Oscar race for Best Foreign
Language Film (although it contains a lot of English) and it’s an intriguing choice
from a country at the centre of the migration crisis since the land of loukoumades
often provides an access point from regions of conflict to mainland Europe.
Amerika Square is
very timely with its fable about closed minds and closed borders. Lest we
forget that the film comes at a moment in time where the European Union is
exerting its power to close its borders to refugees escaping conflicts in the
Middle East and Africa. Poison baked in bread is just a quicker death sentence
than immobility.
