What type of viewer needs to watch The Story of the Green Line? The question should perhaps be rephrased; people don’t watch films because they ‘need to’, and telling them they do is liable to put them off. Still, let’s politely suggest that Greek and Turkish Cypriots under the age of 30 ‘need to’ watch this film, to find out about events that even their parents probably don’t remember. (Director Panicos Chrysanthou is in his mid-60s.) And of course extreme nationalists ‘need to’ watch the film – though it’s too much to hope that it’ll sway them – and those with memories of mixed villages should probably watch it, so that they can nod ruefully. Expats and foreigners may also want to watch it, though in their case they probably can’t: except for a few lines in English, the film is in Greek and Turkish with corresponding Turkish/Greek subtitles, a nice bicommunal touch that’s unfortunately no help to Anglophones.
I assume it’ll come out with English subtitles eventually, if only for one-off institutional screenings. This is exactly the kind of film we like to show to foreigners, to draw attention to our plight, yet prefer not to watch ourselves (I may be wrong, of course; I hope I am). The ‘Cyprus problem’ is largely a problem of repression and denial – neither side likes to dwell on the recent past, or tell the whole truth when it does – and the problem is exacerbated when it comes to Cypriot cinema because films are escapist anyway. Few will choose a local movie over a glitzy blockbuster at the multiplex, let alone when that local movie talks about the issues they prefer to ignore in the first place.
There’s another caveat when it comes to Cypriot cinema. Local films are often assumed to be amateurish – and there’s something in that, since we don’t really have a professional film industry; Cypriot directors, except the ones working in TV, tend to be hardy obsessives who don’t get much practice actually plying their craft (Mr Chrysanthou hasn’t made a feature since Akamas in 2006). Let’s therefore make it clear that The Story of the Green Line isn’t amateurish. Admittedly it’s not cinematically ambitious, going for a becalmed visual style, not many close-ups, relatively sparse use of music and occasional Nature shots. The white, limpid lighting isn’t much like the usual movie look in 2017, more like films from 30 years ago. But the film moves easily, and the actors don’t overdo things like they do on TV. They’ve been directed to keep their faces still, look sincere and sometimes glower – and maybe they glower too much, but quiet intensity is surely preferable to melodrama.
The script (by Chrysanthou) also has comic touches, especially in showing the lives of the conscripts serving on the Green Line in 1977: in the most raucous scene, an officer’s patriotic spiel about “mother Greece” and “serving the country” is interrupted by a loud fart, and the officer is so indignant he sniffs each soldier’s bum in turn to find the blasphemer! The officers (on both sides) are the villains here, the soldiers generally laid-back even as they hurl insults – and sometimes rocks – across the Line. The film’s worldview is solidly left-wing, viewing the real war as being between those in power and those they oppress (i.e. class-based), not between one ethnic group and another – and the plot, inevitably, has a Greek and Turkish Cypriot soldier bonding over the discovery that the Turk, who’s been displaced from his own village, is living in the Greek’s old house. Kypros and Murat, both refugees, are also haunted by the spectre of dads who were killed by the other side – one murder shown in a flashback that’s really quite powerful, evoking the horror of neighbours turning on each other in a previously-placid mixed village. “Since when did you become a ‘Turk’,” asks one victim poignantly, faced with the barrel of a gun, “and I a ‘Greek’?”
All well and good – but the real question, for a viewer, lies elsewhere: Is this merely ‘good-for-you’ cinematic spinach, or is The Story of the Green Line worth watching? To be honest, that’s a tough one. The story doesn’t really coalesce (though individual scenes mostly work), and some of the detail is old-fashioned to the point of being risible. This is a movie where our hero counts down the days while in prison by actually writing numbers on the wall and drawing lines through them, and a movie where being in love is expressed by shots of almond trees in bloom.
It’s also, perhaps, an outdated movie. “Be realistic: demand the impossible,” it proclaims more than once, quoting Che Guevara – but a more significant line may be Kypros’ teenage sister insisting that “The world has changed”. These days, being ‘realistic’ should take into account an entire generation who grew up after 1974 and barely even think about the Green Line, except to take it for granted. At some point we really need to decide what we want, which may not be the wide-eyed bicommunalism espoused by Chrysanthou – but that will involve active discussion, and this heartfelt, even-handed film does its bit to spark that discussion. All in all, I think you should watch it.
DIRECTED BY Panicos Chrysanthou STARRING Mihalis Sofokleous, Cihan Tariman, Matthias Lier In Greek, Turkish and some English. Cyprus/Greece 2017 113mins