‘Stray Bodies’: Thessaloniki Review

Dir: Elina Psykou. Greece/Switzerland/Italy/Bulgaria. 2024. 109mins

Issues of life, dying, borders and faith are provocatively thought-about by Elina Psykou in her typically playful, usually transferring debut documentary. The filmmaker, who beforehand made fiction options The Everlasting Return Of Antonis Paraskevas and the Tribeca jury award-winning Son Of Sofia, zones in on a few of the world’s most contentious topics: the proper to die by assisted suicide, abortion and IVF therapy. Whereas many documentarians might need solely come at this from a first-person perspective, Psykou opens up these fields for debate, additionally giving a voice to those that disagree with the liberty to decide on these choices.

Stray Our bodies’ most advanced and transferring scenes centre on assisted suicide in Zurich

The truth that Stray Our bodies is constructed upon particular person testimonies of these searching for that freedom could point out which facet of the controversy Psykou is on, however her resolution to incorporate different opinions makes for a extra sturdy documentary that doesn’t draw back from complexity. After its world premiere in competitors at Thessaloniki Documentary Movie Pageant, it’s going to display screen in competitors at CPH:DOX and is prone to appeal to extra pageant curiosity – significantly because it doesn’t merely deal with a single nation or situation, though footage of an assisted suicide would possibly make it a harder promote.

The European Union could also be a collective, not less than in financial phrases, however from an moral perspective the boundaries are versatile, usually main those that need medical procedures which can be unlawful of their homeland to hunt them overseas. Amongst them is Robin, a younger Maltese girl who grew to become pregnant after a one-night stand and is now heading to Sicily to have the abortion she can not legally purchase in Malta. In the meantime, Italians Katerina and Gaia are travelling to hunt IVF therapy for the infants they need in Greece, as a result of single ladies will not be allowed the process at house. By the course of this movie we’ll additionally meet individuals journeying to Switzerland to finish their lives, and the physician who helps them.

Psykou units out her stall with a recreation, asking varied contributors for one-word “associative” solutions to subjects together with IVF, euthansia and faith. The inclusion of faith is one thing the filmmaker will return to repeatedly, questioning – both overtly or extra obliquely – the influence Christianity has had on international locations’ legal guidelines and, at instances, suggesting a form of theological cognitive dissonance. 

Christian iconography is especially noticeable within the section regarding Robin, as Psykou highlights statues, work and even ready room magazines which have a spiritual factor. We’ll additionally meet a deacon who speaks about his horror at realising aborted infants have been disposed of as medical waste, and a monk who’s reliant on round the clock care and speaks by way of a pc however who views euthanasia as “an ideal tragedy”.

As the varied contributors cross nation borders for the medical providers they need, Stray Our bodies nudges at contradictions. The celebration of Mary’s ‘virgin’ beginning appears to conflict with a Christian who claims IVF permits a form of eugenics, or single mums being denied the therapy in Italy – which in 2016 ran a extremely controversial ’Fertility Day’ marketing campaign. (The very nature of a few of its reproductive material makes this a female-centric movie, though Psykou additionally features a significant apart regarding incapacity and sperm donation.)

Stray Our bodies’ most advanced and transferring scenes centre on assisted suicide in Zurich. The doctor who has helped many sufferers contemplates the suggestion that she is “enjoying God”, noting that she can be doing that if she helps somebody with antibiotics or stents to forestall them from dying. A Greek physician who watched her personal mom die of mind most cancers is visibly moved as one other aged girl makes the selection to finish her life with the assistance of her son. This isn’t straightforward to observe, but it surely sensitively dealt with by Pyskou.

If the segments involving abortion don’t really feel fairly as ‘genuine’ as the remainder of Stray Our bodies, credit reveal that ’because of the actual danger of imprisonment dealing with ladies in Malta who’ve abortions, the occasions of this specific story have been re-enacted for the movie’ and based mostly on testimony. A press release which, in itself, offers pause for thought. Psykou mitigates this restaging considerably by making the part with Robin really feel extra experimental basically, together with a dance sequence set to Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, which partially takes place in a church.

“What if there’s a treatment?,” a girl searching for assisted dying is requested. “Each selection is a danger,” she replies. Psykou eloquently makes the case that the choice to take that danger iies with a person, not the church or state.