A kind of canine Kedi arrives on DVD: Mary Zournazi's doc, DOGS OF DEMOCRACY

Since both the very popular cats-of-Istanbul documentary, Kedi, and the just-now-arriving-on-DVD doc about some Athens canines, DOGS OF DEMOCRACY, were made in 2016, I don't think you can accuse either of any kind of plagiarism. Yet it's very difficult to watch the latter without constantly recalling the former. Kedi is the longer film (by 21 minutes) and the better one -- more graceful and professional -- too. But writer/director/ cinematographer Mary Zournazi's 57-minute movie is still very much worth seeing.

Ms Zournazi (shown at left) is the Australian daughter of a pair of Grecian ex-pats who only recently made her first trip to that "cradle of democracy," which was at the time (and still is) going through an economic crisis which has put that country's 99 per cent into a state of what appears to be an ongoing and maybe permanent kind of "austerity" which has thrown a huge amount of its population into actual poverty (or even deeper poverty). And while the general public has done everything from continually protesting this austerity and had even elected a government that tried to do something about this, it has all been to little avail. The uber-sleazbag politicians who brought Greece to its knees seem to have gone unpunished, and, as usual in our current western would-be "democracies," it is the public who pays for it all -- over and over and over again.

While Kedi was barely political (I recall a single anti-Erdoğan slogan appearing as graffiti; anything more and its filmmaker might not still be among the living), Dogs of Democracy definitely is. Like the cats of Kedi, these dogs live on the streets and are cared for only via the good will of the humans who help them.

Yet they seem to have taken their place as canine helpers of the many protestors who regularly take to the streets. The dogs have endured tear gas attacks, just as have the protestors, and have had their already short life span made even shorter.

We hear from one of the people who care for the dogs -- himself a homeless person -- that a stray dog's life expectancy is around three years, due to the probability of being hit by an automobile or poisoned. As in Kedi, we meet a number of the folk (above and below) who make it a point to care for these animals, and we're also given a little history of Greece and its dogs, in particular one famous canine who regularly visited a POW camp during World War II and which, more than any of the Germans in charge of the camp, attested to the humanity of the prisoners there.

The movie is a pretty interesting -- but also pretty uneven -- mix of interviews, visuals, poetry, prose, dogs and history (and, finally, even a single cat!). For animal lovers of any sort, I should think it will be a slam dunk, given how bracing and often moving is its mix of animals helping humans and humans helping animals always turns out to be.

Among the various folk we meet, the most famous face probably belongs to Yanis Varoufakis, the economist/academic/politician who served for six months as Greece's Minister of Finance back in 2015 -- though he, like some of the others interviewed here, are identified only by their first name. This may be cozy but it's not particularly professional. The movie could have used a bit more rigor.

From EPF Media and released via MVD Entertainment Group, the documentary hit the street earlier this month and is available now for purchase or (I would hope) rental.

A country and a family on the road to ruin in Syllas Tzoumerkas' Greek drama, A BLAST

What was it like to have been a citizen of Greece back in 2014, when the film under consideration here -- A BLAST -- was first released? In it, we watch, semi-hypnotized by the behavior -- crazy, highly sexual, and not very loving -- of the family members we encounter. Even when they appear to be trying to approximate kindness, most of their actions comes out as either passive-aggressive or full out angry. And why not, since their country is headed for, if not already completely mired in financial ruin. As the whipping boy for the IMF and World Bank, Greece's employment rate was running at around 28 per cent, with the youth unemployment rate nearly double that. The family's personal lives and financial situation, we soon discover, are even worse.

As written and directed by Syllas Tzoumerkas (shown at left, and more recently the co-writer of that self-destructive doctor movie, Suntan), A Blast begins in media res, as we see a car racing through a forest near the sea, even as we hear a news report of a fire seemingly caused by arson. Tzoumerkas then flashes back to (sort of) happier days, and we see a pair of adults siblings playing/fighting at the beach, as exposition is dropped fairly speedily and well, prior to our meeting these young ladies' parents: mom, confined to a wheelchair but still apparently ruling the roost, along with a rather weak-willed dad.

Our star and heroine, Maria, is played by the oft-seen Greek actress Angeliki Papoulia (above and below, from Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster), a beautiful woman who possesses a good body, expressive face and a fine array of acting chops. In this particular film however, Ms Papoulia proves mostly sex-crazed.

In one bizarre scene (above), she goes into a computer room full of men at work, turns on her computer to a porn site and proceeds to watch and listen, even as the poor guys around her find it, well, hard to concentrate on their own screen.

Her need for sex would seem to stem, at least in part, from the unavailability of her extremely handsome and hunky husband, Yannis (newcomer Vassilis Doganis, above and below), a Greek marine who's off at sea for much of the time. Yannis himself seems to be getting plenty of sex, even if his wife is not: We see him with a pretty black woman at one point (perhaps a prostitute), and then, having a very hot encounter with a male shipmate. Filmmaker Tzoumerkas makes certain we get, early on, a full-frame, full-frontal of his actor in the nude, and then intercuts often pieces of a soft-core sex scene (below) into his film's flashbacks. Thus we get plenty of the physicality of this rather amazing performer, whose first film this was, and who, according to the IMDB, has not been heard of since. Not to worry, what we see of him in A Blast should make Mr. Doganis a rather permanent fixture in some of our sexual memory banks.

As the family's fortunes wane further, and mom's misdeeds (that's Themis Bazaka in the role, below) become apparent, daughter Maria grows crazier and crazier. While Ms Papoulia does a bang-up job of creating this woman's disintegration, Mr. Tzoumerkas has not given us quite enough depth in his screenplay to make the movie into the tragedy that this kind of story probably deserves.

The family seems simply too crazy too soon, and so, even as more weird incidents pile up, our sympathy fails to be engaged past a certain surface point. The situation -- Greece's and the family's -- is certainly fraught and vitally important. Yet the handling of it all, while perhaps enough for the Greek audience that has by now lived through so much pain, austerity and other major crap, may not prove quite enough for those of us internationally who have yet to feel the ever-tightening vise of globalization and wealth inequality as wielded by the world's most powerful at their most damaging.

Perhaps a little less sex and a little more specificity regarding Greek life, family and otherwise, might have made this movie -- if less marketable internationally -- more meaningful and important.

From IndiePix Films and running a just-about-right 80 minutes, A Blast makes its U.S. DVD debut this coming Tuesday, August 22 -- for purchase and/or rental.

The Greece situation comes to partial life in Theopi Skarlatos & Paul Mason's hour-long documentary, ThisIsACoup

For those of us who followed, news-wise over the past years, the horrific "austerity" situation in Greece and (to a lesser extent) Spain, along with the behavior of the European Union in the case of Greece, which has appeared profoundly anti-Democratic and unnecessarily, even torturously punishing. The election in both countries of leftist, popular governments seemed to indicate a rise of the kind of Democracy that might put the people in power, rather than, as ever, the banking interests, the wealthy and the already powerful. Instead, the flame-out of Greece's radical left party, Syriza, seems to have left the country and its populace with one less alternative to even more ridiculous and harmful (to anyone except the wealthy) belt-tightening austerity.

What happened and why is the subject of a new four-part -- each part lasting around 15 minutes -- documentary titled #THISISACOUP, being released by Field of Vision, the new "film unit" created by Laura Poitras and others, in collaboration with The Intercept/First Look Media. Directed by Theopi Skarlatos and produced by Paul Mason, the series may prove somewhat eye-opening for anyone who did not follow the story as it was breaking and continuing. But for those of us who read the coverage in, say, The Nation, or The New York Times, the hour proves a distinct disappointment.

The idea that one could cover the whole thing in four fifteen minute episodes seems odd to begin with. Add to this the fact that the series seems to skirt along the surface, interviewing the same few people, including an actress/protester and a dock worker, over and over again. What? Among the protesters, nobody else had anything interesting to say? We also never get underneath the situation to discover what plan -- if any -- Alexis Tsipras (above), leader of the supposedly "radical left" party, Syriza, and the country's eventual Prime Minister, and his head of finance, Yanis Varoufakis (below, left), had ready (or even imagined in their minds) to put into place. No hard questions are asked of either man.

Instead, over the four segments, it seems that just about everyone (everyone we see here, at least) imagined that simply having the people vote against austerity would be enough to change the behavior of the European Union. Yeah, right. For whatever reason, the doc doesn't go into the possibility of dropping out of the European Union, leaving the Euro to return to the Drachma. (Sure there would be a huge "run" on the banks. But, hell, Syriza achieved that "run" anyway by doing little to nothing.)

In Part One, we are promised the Greek story from the inside, and indeed the filmmakers seem to have gotten great access to and support from Tsipras and Varoufakis. We see that, yes, we're all connected. But some, as usual, are connected a bit better than others.

Part Two tells us that most of the bailout money went to the banks, who were in large part responsible for the country's melt-down (does this sound familiar, Americans?), with only eleven per cent of the money going to the people themselves. (I don't think our country even managed that much for the American people, but then we were not nearly in the dire straits of the Greeks.) Syriza then passes a law to give food and electricity to the poor, and Europe responds by trying to stop this. The country's money is running out, and the populace has taken to the streets, demonstrating with placards the likes of "Jesus: Please Save Greece."

That populace becomes bitterly divided by Part Three, during which Tsipras, receiving no help from the EU, calls for a plebiscite. It happens, and the anti-austerity forces win (again). But in Part Four we see that this vote has no effect at all, except bringing the EU to force the Greek PM into even further concessions to austerity, after which Syriza's MPs resign and Tsipras, though still PM, is finished so far as any effective governing and positive change are concerned.

The documentary's most perspicacious sections deal with Zoe Konstantopoulou, a human rights lawyer and Syriza's most senior female MP, who has plenty to say. One wonders how she might have handled things differently from Tsipras. The point of the film seems to be that Greece tried Democracy, but that this did not matter to those in power at the EU. (Jesus seems not to have come through, either.) The IMF, by the way, has since halted its austerity stance, but the EU is still bent on policies that punish. So, now, as the doc points out, who knows to whom the Greek people will turn next? (The threat of the populace voting into power an ever-nasty, right-wing government is here implied.)

What the film accomplishes best is to ask that old question, once again: What kind of real change is possible without a definite plan and at least some power to back up that plan? Cuba, and to a lesser extent Venezuela, are accused of being dictatorships, and indeed they are/were. But they were also successful in many ways: They had a plan and the power to back it up. Evidently, Greece had only the chance to vote against something -- with nothing at all ready or able to replace that something.

We here in America (including me) voted for Obama, who despite his promises, proved to be thoroughly in bed with Wall Street and the banks, offering an administration about as transparent as a brick wall. (Let's not even try to go after the criminals in the Bush administration or on Wall Street. No, let's prosecute whistle-blowers instead!) In far too many so-called Western democracies, voting gets you a change of sleazy politicians, not a change of policies. Revolution, for all its attendant problems, brings real change -- for the better and the worse.

If you know little about Greece's current situation, then by all means, watch #ThisIsACoup. Just don't expect depth or even much common sense or political acuity from the people-in-charge, in front of or behind the camera. The program makes its debut on the Field of Vision site, this coming Tuesday, December 15, with a new episode added each day for the following three days. And, so far as I can determine, the viewing is free of charge. Click here for more information, and here to see the trailer for the first episode.