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BIF&ST 2018

Review: The Last Note

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- The film by Pantelis Voulgaris – about the shooting of 200 Greek partisans during the Nazi occupation in 1944 – focuses on the dignity of men, to ultra-dramatic effects

Review: The Last Note
Melia Kreiling and Andreas Konstantinou in The Last Note

"Our Father who art in heaven, do not forgive them for their sins," recites one of the prisoners in Chaidari concentration camp, in the Attica region of Greece, while witnessing the umpteenth brutality inflicted by the German occupiers on one of the many Greek partisans locked up there. It’s 1944 and the camp inmates tolerate violence and abuse with dignity, while out there the resistance continues to rack up victims. And it’s precisely the killing of four Nazis by the Greek partisans and the subsequent German retaliation – resulting in 200 men being shot at Kaisariani on 1 May 1944 – that is at the heart of The Last Note [+see also:
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by the veteran Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris, screened in the International Panorama competition at the 9th Bif&st - Bari International Film Festival (21 to 28 April).

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If the first part of the film focuses on life in the camp, with its sadly well-known corollary of screaming German officers, whips, threats, insults, summary executions – essentially the inhumanity of Nazism that we’ve seen on screen so many times before. It's the second part of The Last Note that really leaves a mark, when, now condemned to death, these men release all their pride and desperate vitality. The emotional side of the story is definitely not overlooked. Flashbacks to times past – when prisoners’ lives were beautiful and full of love – and to visits from wives and daughters to the camp and their subsequent forced separations, only serve to emphasise just how much these people had to lose in this senseless war. And when there is a glimpse of a chance of salvation for the film’s protagonist, Napoleon (Andreas Konstantinou) and for his love interest (played by Melia Kreiling) at the cost of betraying his comrades (suggested by a Nazi commander played by the German actor André Hennicke, byvirtue of the role of Napoleon as a translator), the viewer experiences a moment of hesitation and bewilderment, faced with such an impossible dilemma.

When all is lost, and the only thing that awaits these men is an order to commence shooting, Voulgaris and his co-writer (and wife) Ioanna Karystiani choose to slow down the pace of the film, expanding time and creating a growing pathos: starting with a list of the 200 names of those who are due be executed, before screening a long scene that includes traditional dances and songs that the prisoners embrace the night before their execution, with the noise flooding the room where the aloof SS officers are eating their dinner, followed by scenes showing the men preparing to die looking "handsome" and then the scene in which we witness the actual shooting, where we are spared almost nothing, twenty men at a time, with extensive use of slow motion. The effect is ultra-dramatic, intentional, brazen. Some would call it a "tearjerker." But all things considered, this is ultimately how we should be leaving screenings about the history of war and broken lives: with tears in our eyes. 

The Last Note is a Yannis Iakovidis production for Black Orange, co-produced by COSMOTE TV and Little England SA, with the support of the Centre for Greek Film.

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(Translated from Italian)

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