The video essay Passing Drama renders a close listening of Melitopoulos’s migration history that was handed down across three generations. “Drama” is the name of a small town in Northern Greece where refugees who had survived the Asia Minor Catastrophe settled down after 1923. Many of their children then became forced laborers in Nazi Germany during World War II and even later guest workers in Germany. Their history was shaped by Turkey, Greece, and Germany’s concealing of historical facts and by the need to forget the traumatic experiences of exodus of these first and second generations of refugees: fissures and discontinuities gaped open in the transfer of memory, of knowledge, of habits of thinking and living. The forgetting of yesterday was interwoven with the forgetting of the day before yesterday and mingled with forgetting of today. But in their speeches and stories traces of a collective memory are embodied in their voices: because inextinguishable sentences—“sentences like stones”—were expressed and repeated in various circumstances, they crystallized into song lines about deportation, displacement, and flight. The memories of these migrants contain a truth that does not only apply to them. For what happened to them has also happened to us: a radical change in living one’s memory and one’s time. The notation of forgetting is expressed in Passing Drama through a woven montage of images that are processed in different ways. The farther back in the past that the events took place, the more the image manipulation and montage were processed materially for the narrative. Each place represents a different temporal modality in the narrative. From a simple slow motion of image generation to the multiple manipulations of image speed, different degrees of “time abstraction” are attributed to the “generation” of the story accordingly.

Angela Melitopoulos’ Passing Drama (1999) will be screened on December 14, 2024 at 5 pm as part of the Hangi İnsan Hakları Film Festivali (Which Human Rights? Film Festival) at the Pera Museum. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Angela Melitopoulos.

The event is free of charge.

Angela Melitopoulos was a resident at the Tarabya Cultural Academy from March 2022 to September 2022 and is now on site again as part of an extension.