On March 15th, we were privileged to enjoy the first showing of Jill Daniel's film, "Next Year in Lerin", which tells the story of twenty-eight thousand Greek and Slavic Macedonian children who were taken from Greece by the Democratic Army, without their mothers, to escape the Greek civil war. They were dispersed throughout Eastern Europe; only those of Greek origin were allowed to return.
The film centres on a reunion in Skopje to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1948 exodus, where the former child-refugees speak of their journey, of their feelings of identity and longings to at least see the villages they come from. There is singing and dancing, people have come from America, Australia and other places and meet long lost relatives.
Intercut with this is archive film of the childrens' journey and family photographs, and film made in the Greek villages, showing empty houses. One man has been able to return by altering his passport, and he shows a photograph of his family house and a stone he has brought from its foundations. In a moving sequence, hands reach out to touch the rounded speckled granite stone; one man who has not been able to return says, "I think that he is full and I am empty". At the end of the film, we see a bus waiting at the Greek border, and hear that some were allowed in to visit their old homes and some turned away. Beck Woodrow South-East European Studies University of Lampeter 2000
http://www.jilldanielsfilms.com/articles.html#
ReplyDelete‘Next Year in Lerin’
On March 15th, we were privileged to enjoy the first showing of Jill Daniel's film, "Next Year in Lerin", which tells the story of twenty-eight thousand Greek and Slavic Macedonian children who were taken from Greece by the Democratic Army, without their mothers, to escape the Greek civil war. They were dispersed throughout Eastern Europe; only those of Greek origin were allowed to return.
The film centres on a reunion in Skopje to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1948 exodus, where the former child-refugees speak of their journey, of their feelings of identity and longings to at least see the villages they come from. There is singing and dancing, people have come from America, Australia and other places and meet long lost relatives.
Intercut with this is archive film of the childrens' journey and family photographs, and film made in the Greek villages, showing empty houses. One man has been able to return by altering his passport, and he shows a photograph of his family house and a stone he has brought from its foundations. In a moving sequence, hands reach out to touch the rounded speckled granite stone; one man who has not been able to return says, "I think that he is full and I am empty". At the end of the film, we see a bus waiting at the Greek border, and hear that some were allowed in to visit their old homes and some turned away.
Beck Woodrow
South-East European Studies
University of Lampeter
2000