From the Edge of the City

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06/04/2011 "Apo tin akris tis polis" See more 03/02/2011 From the edge (prostitution) of the City (a ghetto in Athens) comes Stathis Papadopoulos as Sasha, a street hustler. He quits his construction job, moves to the city itself, fantasies about marrying a girl, and confesses that at 17, he's too old to hustle since he started at 13. What a life! This is enough material to carve an interesting character study. Instead, director and writer Constantinos Giannaris has too many characters and it's confusing when so many characters appear on screen in remembering their traits or Sasha's group of friends. The director opts for style over substance so the movie is unfocused. Some of the scenes are purely homoerotic which is fine but is inconsistent with the drama. It's infuriating because I really wanted to like this movie. Overall, I'm glad that I viewed it since Papadopoulos is fine in the role and Greek movies are rare. See more 06/26/2010 Not a film that improves with repeated watching. It's interesting enough but the pseudo-documentary scenes jar with the rest of the film and the cod psychopathology fails to flesh out the characters with any sympathetic traits. See more 02/28/2009 It could have been much better if it didn't feel so much like a videoclip at times.. See more 01/25/2009 There were so many tan, toned Greeks in this movie I had a hard time concentrating on the plot. See more 03/24/2008 FROM THE EDGE OF THE CITY, Greece's official submission for the best Foreign Film Oscar, is a multi-layered film that can likewise appeal to many spheres of society. In (homophobic?) Greece, it has been viewed as a serious study of urban angst, involving immigrant Russian Greeks avoiding any mention of the film's overkill gay content. Nevertheless, it has been a box-office success, though mainstream Greece dares not mention one of the reasons for the success is the (paid) love that likewise dares not mention its name. In contrast, the film's international exposure up to now, prior to the Oscar nominations, has been almost exclusively at International Gay Film Festivals: San Francisco and, particularly Verzaubert, which tours Germany's largest cities, including Berlin where I saw it. The American-accented openly gay director of the film (one of the few Greek professionals who has dared come out of the closet) made a point of explaining this to the all-male sold-out crowd in Berlin in late November. He made the movie as a labor of love; out of his fixation on the leading character, which, like the rest of the cast, are not professional actors, just real Russian-Greek immigrant youth. These guys' desperate quest to get ahead in the European Union's consumer-driven society leads them to crime, including male prostitution, though they themselves exploit female prostitutes. Add to those conflicts, the homoerotic overtones of these teenage guys' physical contacts, realization and open discussion of their lives as homosexual prostitutes, and the film exceeds any definition of a gay film. This is very clear. That notwithstanding, many will continue to be in denial of this, and look at the film as social commentary, as an immigration tragedy, as a generational-conflict movie. Indeed, this movie can be many things to many people. See more Read all reviews

From the Edge of the City

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