The War will still be here Tomorrow! The sentence is painted with crude letters on an abandoned wagon. It is rusty and beaten up. Its former use a bit unclear. Probably a remnant of some military presence in the rugged landscape.
A man is passing by on a small motorbike. He stops to ponder. Then he continues. He exiled himself from #Athens during the crisis, and now he lives all by himself on an island. He left after a boy was killed at #Exarceia, the technical university in the Greek capital. He keeps thinking of the slogans back then – «Cops, pigs, killers!» December 2008 was not a response, but another question. The man, who calls himself Filoktitis, now claims to have left behind his addictions and the explosive situations.
This is the frame of a new film by Belgian artist/director duo Elise Florenty and Marcel Türcowsky. They are known for their experimental work, and their latest certainly follows that tradition. The film is set on the #Aegean island of #Lemnos where Filoktitis has taken refuge. He is squatting in the eroded landscape, keeping to himself after participating in the #Athens riots# in reaction to the #economic meltdown# of #Greece in 2008.
Greek narrative
There is talk about crisis and #morphine. Filoktitis has not escaped into drug use, but he is constantly moving through various #hallucinations, experiencing different states of embodiment and disembodiment. The physical space is Lemnos, but the story of the film moves through so many registers, from news footage to video games, that most of the time it is hard to tell what is real and what is virtual.
Although he left Athens in order to escape the crisis, past and future scenarios of conflict are catching up with him. Multilayered reality is all around Filoktitis when he ventures off on the island.
Lemnos is an important part of the Greek narrative. When the hero #Odysseus was on his way to the war against #Troy the passed it and set up quarter in and around a grotto in its mountain landscape. The story says that when he continued his famous travel, he left behind one of his men, Filokitis – or Philoctetes. He had been bitten on the foot by a snake, and the smell of the infection was so bad that Odysseus’ men could not be near him. But being the best man with a bow and an arrow, Odysseus knew that he could not win the war without Filoktitis, so ten years later he came to pick him up.
Although he left Athens in order to escape the crisis, past and future scenarios of conflict are catching up with him.
In modern times, Lemnos was home to a large Greek army base that was later abandoned. This is where Filoktitis roams on his small motorbike. He calls the island «the #Siberia of Greece», a desolated space that is part of reality and at the same time seemingly cut off from everything.
Lemnos also gained fame as the setting of the open-world, military tactical video game #ARMA 3#. It is a single-player game where one US Army soldier is facing a number of different missions against an unseen and mighty enemy. The actions are going on in a future where the global strategic setup has changed radically. NATO is badly battered and on retreat while the new military powerhouse is coming from somewhere in South East Asia.
In the very real world of September 2012, Greek police arrested two Czechs on Lemnos. They were charged with espionage because they were recording videos of the abandoned army camp. According to Greek law, taking photographs of army installations is a matter of national security, and the two transgressors were held in custody for 128 days. Only later did the authorities admit that the two were not spies, but employees of Bohemia Interactive, the developer of the video game. They were just researching in the abandoned barracks of Lemnos and posed no security risk whatsoever.
Doc-fiction hybrid
This mixed bag of real and virtual realities is constantly hovering around Filoktitis. The underlying question is whether you are able to escape the world by exiling yourself to Lemnos, or to Siberia for that matter. Filoktitis changes shape all the time, from argonaut to avatar and back again. The soldiers in the video game are crying for morphine to ease the pain of their wounded comrades, and that only adds to the delirium that follows the story all the way. Who and what is real, and what is not? The war keeps coming back – be it the Athens riots, the virtual struggle against The East Wind, the Asian hordes attacking virtual Lemnos, or the Greek authorities’ attempt to protect a non-existing military secret against imagined spies.
Florenty and Türcowsky weave a fascinating doc-fiction hybrid. It captures the core of what it is like to exist in a secluded space, where one can either fold into the surrounding history or step into technological realms. That is the reality. Never mind how dedicated you are, you can never fully exit the world because the world will always catch up with you.
‘Back to 2069’ screens at 2020 Cinéma du réel
