In Constantine Giannaris’s 1998 film From The Edge of the City, the young and beautiful protagonist Sasha (Stathis Papadopoulos) ends up clashing with his family, setting him down a dark path of criminality, prostitution, and drug use. In the first video lecture, we are introduced to the setting of the film, the main characters motivations, and the language, and cultural specificity of the Russian-speaking Greek refugees living in Menidi, Athens featured in the film. When outlining the primary characteristics of films in the New Queer Cinema movement, author Michele Aaron argues that New Queer Cinema “films give voice to the marginalized not simply in terms of focusing on the lesbian and gay community, but on the sub-groups contained within it.” (Aaron, 4) After reading Aaron’s “New Queer Cinema”, it was interesting to watch a film that both blatantly expressed many characteristics of New Queer Cinema, while at the same time abandoning certain traditions of the film movement all together. The film also challenges the confines of heterosexual and homosexual identities through Sasha’s queer experiences, in its refusal of strictly identify with one or the other. The queerness of The Edge of the City is heightened by the defiant nature of the formal aspects of the film – at times being authentic and realistic in style, but also remaining surprisingly playful, ironic, and artistic as well. The film traverses Sasha’s gritty and sexualized urban reality without becoming cloying or overly romantic, instead depicting the gloomy reality of the characters with a fiercely honest, yet playful visual flare. Unfortunately, there are no available movie clips for the film on YouTube, but you can watch the trailer here for more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKTWf-9RXGU. The defiant and rebellious attitude of films characterized within the New Queer Cinema umbrella can be understood as a refusal of the dogma of positive representations and affirmative role models.

I admired the mention of other, similar queer films that share the nefarious characteristics of From The Edge of the City, specifically Gus Van Zant’s Mala Noche (1986) and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2014). I remember years ago, being struck by both of these films and the characters within them; what fascinated me the most was their refusal to seek approval and their irreverent freedom. These aspects of representation seemed very different than other LGBTQ+ stories I had seen before, because the characters at their centers actually seemed like real human beings with complex faults, deficiencies, and limitations, instead of clichés or stereotypes of queer victimization and/or positive queer imagery. From The Edge of the City fits agreeably alongside both of the latter films in its study of the darker shades of queer living, though it is more in line with Angelina Maccorone’s Unveiled in terms of exploring ideas of borders, boundaries, migration, displaced subjects, and typically ignored minority queer communities. The global political engagement that New Queer Cinema films like Unveiled and From The Edge of the City have is different from a lot of their counterparts, asking pressing political questions of borders, migration, morality, and humanity. The intentional break from optimistic and positive one-note portrayals of queer people on screen – in favor of more fully-realized and complex queer representation – is one of the most imperative characteristics of the filmmaking regarded as New Queer Cinema. The importance of this break from positive imagery is due to its queer refusal to be anything but human – even incredibly faulty and problematic ones.

From The Edge of the City’s Sasha and his acquaintances in Menidi, Athens experience the oppression and violence of the borders and boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality, thus making them more vulnerable subjects to the cruelty of such otherism. In a specific scene around a pool table, Sasha and his friend acknowledge their isolation living as Russians in Greece, and the exacerbated alienation they feel because of such an unstable position. Giannaris’ film suggests that the borders of sexuality and gender include heterosexual assumptions, and Sasha openly rebels against the contours of gender identity, heteronormativity, and what is considered normal and legitimate in society. I was intrigued by the point that these borders of sexuality, nation, gender and race are seen as “impenetrable” in people’s imagination (E. Balibar), especially when they live particularly marginalized communities and places of the world. The mood of multi-dimensional alienation throughout the film is outlined as one of the greatest achievements of From The Edge of the City in Dimitris Papanikolaou’s article titled “New queer Greece: thinking identity through Constantine Giannaris’ From The Edge of the City and Ana Kokkino’s Head On.” The author writes about aspects such as the youthful age of the protagonists, and references their identification distinction from “faggots”, even though they sell their bodies to men. He writes about the characters in the film stating “sex is easily available, love visible but out of reach. They don’t fit into their ‘natural’ identities (family, ethnic, national, sexual) yet have themselves formed a community with its own values.” (Papanikolaou, 186) The multi-dimensional alienation and intersectional oppression that the author argues is so essential to the value of the film, strikes me as the most queer element of this story in many ways. Giannari’s vision of queer seems to be more focused on a defiance of all the cultural and social norms at once, rather than emphasizing sexuality or gender specifically. Giannari is using her characters to explore unknown territories of identity, both geographically, and psychologically, using queerness to “say the unsayable” (Papanikolaou, 183) or reach the unreachable. In films from the New Queer Cinema movement and beyond, queerness is being redefined and reconstructed in a multitude of colorful ways, appropriately stretching the expectations, crossing the borders, shattering the assumptions and defying the odds that so often have been stacked against queer identified human beings for years.