About de What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move

Daphne Heretakis’ film - an equally poetical and political manifesto -  uses a wide range of styles, drawing from documentary filmmaking, essay writing, street interviews, and even musicals to question our relationship to the past and how it can weigh us down, with a great deal of humor and no deference. The film also shines a harsh light on a country’s rut and, more broadly speaking, that of our contemporary societies, questioning the meaning of art, heritage, and political action. A joyful, dazzlingly intelligent perambulation in which we perceive the director’s wish to align her perspective with her convictions. 

Daphné Hérétakis’s interview 

Yorgos Makris’ manifesto

Ten years ago, I shot a film in which the Parthenon crumbled. It stemmed from Victor Hugo’s idea that Caryatids symbolised the people. If they descended from their pedestal, the temple would collapse, and it would be the Caryatids’ Revolution. Back then, I was told about Yorgos Makris’ manifesto, which we address in the film What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move. He's not a very famous poet, even in Greece. He was part of the pre-situationist movement and, right after the Second World War, he wrote a manifesto in which he recommended blowing up the Parthenon. 

Reading it again, I realised that 80 years later, he still had something to tell us. For instance, what is currently happening in Greece with tourism is unbelievable. It’ll soon be impossible to live in the centre of Athens. Everything is shutting down and turned into a hotel. The fact that, already back then, Makris was criticising the presence of that heritage - because obviously Greece is often connected to its heritage - really struck a chord in us. So this text has been with me for a long time. 

The Statues 

I was in Greece during Covid, and so as not to get stuck - in every sense of the word - I went to the streets and filmed. I asked a young man “if you were a statue, what kind of statue would you be?” We see him in the film, he’s the one who answers that he’d be a statue in a cemetery. This was the first footage for the film, and I immediately thought there was something to be done with statues and those rather absurd questions. Connections started to emerge between heritage and contemporary life. I realised that not tackling topics head on like I sometimes do, but rather through the idea of statues, their stillness, and the heritage they symbolise, can be a good way to talk about what’s currently happening in Greece. I wanted to connect Makris’ manifesto to all this. We move on from statues to the Parthenon, and from the Parthenon to the streets, and therefore to the present. The idea for the film was also to take the camera and come up to people. If something is on my mind, I see if it’s on other people’s minds, to create some sort of a dialogue and not be alone with my thoughts. 

Directing and featuring 

I would have liked not to have been in the film, and for there to be no voice over. But I very quickly understood that the only way to be free and to ride the tide of everything I had in mind was to have a voice over that would tie up all these different elements, and would get all the different parts to resonate with one another. I wanted to keep a very lively connection with what was happening, nothing predetermined. At the start, I struggled to have a predefined outlook, because every time I would meet someone, something else would happen, and I wanted to follow that new path. So we all started working together, with the different protagonists. And at the end of the day, the film got me unstuck.