Stop-Over ' , a film that made me want to 'stop- over' it , by Iranian director , Kaveh Bakhtiari,

 

 A group of relatively well fed  looking bourgeois Iranians find them selves in Greece .Not intentionally as their planned destination  ,but in transit, to better pastures .
. Apparently the crooked  people smugglers they had hired ,  had promised them  passage to a  Northern European El Dora do ; possibly Denmark or  Switzerland mentioned many times in our protagonists'   aspirational  conversations  .

Yet the hazardous journey described at one point by their only female member was abandoned after passing from Turkish to Greek Islands of the Aegean Sea and they find themselves in this ' stop  over ' point , called Greece. 

Once in Greece , the film is set mostly within a 'boarding house ' known as 'Amir's place'  we are not really sure whether this is an official refugees' centre where they have been dumped or whether is it is a safe house and  that Amir himself is one who helps the illegal immigrants on their way with bed and board philanthropically or for a fee.
 

This over drawn and   quite drab  ' fly n the wall' documentary  ' extensively films the group as one by one  they make  attempts to move on from this dreaded hell-hole portrayed as Greece. They scheme and dream of getting on lorries , jumping on to planes , make false passports etc and constantly look over their shoulders when they spot gestapo like Greek police men. 'They beat us they beat us!' they complained many times after occasions where they fell into the hands of the police .

We watch them in their  basic , slightly overcrowded but reasonable  living conditions , eating drinking , exercising ,  smoking, frolicking and  complaining bitterly    about their plight and much anger seems directed  at Greece and its police .Had  they not mentioned they were in Greece it would be almost impossible for the untrained eye to establish this.
 

Greece is only shown when our heroes  surreptitiously  walk the streets  of Athens . The streets chosen were  sleazy ,  every wall daubed with  graffiti .The limited outdoor scenes filmed  invariably depicted the coldest ,  darkest ,dampest days , quite uncharacteristic  of the Greek climate.

The back drop to the whole story was  bizarrely a Gothic like atmosphere within a Mediterranean land, with  no signs of a vibrant host nation, no sounds ,smells , sights , no signatures , no land marks . The only 'Greek'  person that could really have had a role   was a shabby destitute looking man holding a young baby who joins them as they make a beach fire  to keep warm at  a desolate looking beach . But hard as the director tried, nature asserted itself with a splendorous dusk scene with glowing sea , as  our group of Iranians show their  humanity and dote over the young child.
 

As they continuously scheme to get out of their predicament , some lose heart and return  to their homeland in Iran , one actually got murdered by bandits as he returned to Iran. The others continued with their schemes , of falsifying passports , lying ,stealing , cheating ;doing anything for their noble cause as the  youngest of their troupe stated: 'To become an engineer in the service of Denmark...'Another in desperation sew his lips together in protest for not being given his 'human  rights' , He spent many days on hunger strike with  disappointingly very little publicity that he desperately hoped for. Eventually the hunger striker appeared to have caused enough embarrassment and media attention to earn him  a passport and get  away from that hell hole.

The director  persuades the audience to empathise with this group of ambitious  illegal    immigrants depicted in this film . No indication was given as to what conditions they left and how their lives were in Iran.
 

Considering it is a land where homosexuals are hanged in public from  building contractors' cranes , where  sexually abused women are publicly  stoned to death for adultery and political dissidents languish in jails under barbaric conditions  , it is surprising that they did not find Greece , it's current political and economic problems notwithstanding  , a stark  but positive contrast to their homeland.

 

And what were they doing there ,most of the time ? they did not contribute by rolling up their sleeves or bending down to work, , as working 'illegally ' is rife in Greece, No they seemed to have enough cash to charge their high tech  mobile phones , to surf  the Internet and contact their loved ones with web cams and talk about journeys to Spain and Norway contrived  on false passports costing thousands of  Euros.

 

Thousands of years ago ,Persia's Nemesis  , Alexander the great , kept out hoards of the Persians from
ever invading Greece again. Thus as historians have it ,the  path of western history panned out as it did. It's legacy being the super powers of the modern day western civilisations .
  

His descendants in modern Greece were unable to keep out this band of idle, go-getting  loafers.

But surely Greece could do without their like ,and  more than likely the   Mullahs of modern day Persia  would not be in a hurry to welcome them back either ....

 

A poor , partisan , self -pitying and manipulative  film , destined for the dustbin of  film  making history .