Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of
This chapter discusses specifically Hellenic frames of reference in Penny Siopis’s films, focusing on her Greek family roots and on political events that marked the twentieth century dispersions of the Greek diaspora, including to the African continent. Theses dispersals were shaped, the chapter shows, by nearly two thousand years of Byzantine and Ottoman Empires in the Eastern Mediterranean, and by the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, among others. The analysis centers on Siopis’s first film, My Lovely Day, and its recounting of events related to the Smyrna catastrophe, on the figure of Demitrios Tsafendas, who fought with communist forces during the Greek Civil War, in Obscure White Messenger, and on several tragic waves of Greek history explored in The New Parthenon. The latter uses the partial lens of her father’s personal history, interweaving this with the rounding up of nine thousand Greeks of Jewish descent in Thessaloniki during World War II and the political imprisonment of Communists on the island of Makronisos after the Greek Civil War.
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