Why
does a seventeen year old become a male prostitute? This question
was recently posed by Konstantinos Giannaris, Greece’s only
out-of-the-closet film director, in a documentary interview
featured on Athens television. In 1998, Giannaris directed
a film to go along with the interview, hiring street prostitutes
in most of the roles, and the result is From the Edge
of the City (Apo tin akri tis polis),
which had a one-week in Los Angeles in December 2000 to qualify
for an Academy Award as best foreign film. The film centers
on the interviewee, Sasha (played by Stathis Papadopoulos),
who was happy as a boy in Kazakhstan until his parents left
for Athens to begin a new life when he was seven years old.
Most of the dialog is in Russian, with English subtitles,
because the principal characters are former residents of the
Soviet Union, though ethnically Greek. (They were part of
the Greek diaspora, having fled Turkish ethnic cleansing in
the 1920s to the Soviet Union, and were relocated by Stalin
in the 1930s to Kazakhstan.) Sasha, whose father (played by
Vasias Eleftheriandis) is a middle-class college graduate,
could not pick up the Greek language in school, so he hangs
out with fellow Russian-speaking young men at Omonia Square
in Athens, and drug use is a regular part of the camaraderie.
When the film begins, Sasha is late for work as a construction
worker, but the labor is too arduous, so he quits to make
easier money "without doing a thing"--by responding to sexual
advances from men, as he has been doing since the age of thirteen.
He refuses to get fucked so that he will not be a "faggot,"
in accordance with Greek traditional views, but his young
friend Panagiotis (played by Panayiotis Hartomatzidis) does
so and still does not consider himself gay. In time, Giorgos
(played by Dimitris Papoulidis) serves as Sasha’s pimp in
a lucrative trade as a prostitute for rich suburban females.
Giorgos asks Sasha to take care of one of his female prostitutes,
Natasha (played by Theodora Tzimou), but he find romantic
interest in her. When he takes her home to his parents, his
father is upset, telling Sasha that her presence has brought
disgrace to the household because she is obviously a whore.
They leave and call for a taxi, but Giorgos unexpectedly arrives
in the incoming taxi, beats up Natasha for pairing up with
Sasha, and then fights with Sasha, who kills him after a scuffle
with one kungfu punch. In the end, police are taking Sasha
to jail. The Q&A that is interspersed throughout the film,
with Giannaris as the unseen interviewer, could presumably
be taken as an interrogation by a social work probation officer,
who would recommend a sentence appropriate to Sasha’s background
and state of mind. Ethnic prejudice is an important element
in the film, as native Greek prostitutes get top dollar, Sasha
and his cohorts rank below as Pontioi (Greeks from the Black
Sea diaspora), but Albanians are at the bottom. Giannaris,
a former male hustler, found Stathis Papadopoulos and was
so amazed by his story that he felt that the Greek public
should know about the alienation of immigrant youth, which
presumably could be avoided if the government provided bilingual
education for language-minority children. Accordingly, the
Political Film Society has nominated From the Edge of
the City as best film exposé of the year 2000. MH
I
want to comment on this film
