What We Ask of a Statue Is that It Doesn't Move

What if statues could talk? What if they decided to move? Between essay, documentary and fiction, Athenian filmmaker Daphne Heretakis immerses us in a playful and political exploration of immobility, the weight of the past and the need for insurrection. A caryatid escapes from the museum, steals a leather jacket and gets lost in the streets of Athens while reading Barthes and Marx.
Through beautifully scripted moments, street interviews, musical fragments and historical texts, the film questions the meaning of art and cultural heritage in a Greece trapped in nostalgia and suffocated by tourism. Inspired by Yorgos Makris' manifesto, which proposed blowing up the Parthenon, Heretakis seeks a way to resist: by not turning ourselves into statues. (RS)