Proti yli

They are Roma, illegal immigrants, they don’t live by our norms, don’t speak our language. They don’t even know what our values are. And as politicians are increasingly fond of saying: they are the thieves of our european prosperity. Just a few of the vast army of desperados who recycle Greece’s metal. They are heroes of “Raw Material” and raw material themselves. State, middlemen, eco-entrepreneurs and industrialists hush up the mythic wealth their labours produce for others. Nightmarishly, from the dustbins of Athens to the toxic junkyards of downtown Athens and from the foundry furnaces to lebanon’s bombed-out Nachr-Al-Baret refugee camp, the metal they collect becomes the foundation of the insane world in which they, and we, live. RAW MATERIAL charts the course of this band of hunter-gatherers in today’s Europe. It confronts the smell of an annoying but exploitable savagery. It documents toil in the burning heat and freezing snow which penetrate its heroes’ bodies to lodge in its viewers’ minds.