In writer-director Dimitris Nakos’s Meat [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Dimitris Nakos
scheda film], Christos (Albanian-Greek actor Kostas Nikouli) is the pseudo-adopted son of butcher Takis (Akilas Karazisis), always playing second fiddle to Takis’s babied biological son Pavlos (Pavlos Iordanopoulos). This premise becomes the perfect setup for a tale inspired by Greek tragedy, rooted in irony, poetic justice and family members turning on family members. Meat enjoyed its world premiere at Toronto and is now competing in the International Competition of this year’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

Cineuropa: The film is described as taking after a Greek tragedy, which can be seen through different character archetypes and broader plot points. What in particular were you seeking to draw from?
Dimitris Nakos: We based the relationships of all of the characters and the break-up of the family [on Greek tragedy]. There is also this element of tragic irony, especially when it comes to the father. Everybody knows the truth [of this story] besides him, like Oedipus. Also, he's very angry when they try to place the blame on him. But this time, he doesn't know that, indeed, the blame is on his family and, in a way, also on him.

Your storytelling style is heavily based on tense conversations and arguments between characters in a confrontational manner. What was your approach to using this device?
It’s a story that begins with arguments, and so it’s really intense from the beginning. They all have many kinds of problems – I don't want to spoil anything, but [in the film,] the body comes up from the ground in the same way that all of the problems of the characters come up. So, for every character, there are problems and situations that were covered up, and now they can’t be hidden any more.

The main character of Christos is from an Albanian background, while his girlfriend, Marilena, wants to go to Athens for work. Were you thinking about stories of migration and movement while writing your characters?
Of course, immigration is not the primary thing in our story, but it plays an important role. Christos is of Albanian origin, but he was born in Greece. Things have changed in Greece and also in other countries, and there is not so much racism as there was in the past. But still, we have some. We have a foreigner who becomes a part of the family, and when [times are tough], he becomes a foreigner again. It’s like, unfortunately, a foreigner always stays a foreigner – and not only from a societal point of view. This thing poisons his very soul.

Your use of handheld camera is very present throughout the film.
We wanted the audience to somehow be thrust inside the screen, not just sit calmly in their seats and watch what happens. If a friend of ours tells us a story that happened to him, and we are just sitting there, drinking coffee and [we begin asking,] “Why did you do this?”, at the same time, we are just sitting. That [static feeling] is something that I wanted to break away from in this situation. With the help of this handheld camera movement, I wanted to bring this tension to the audience so that they would feel what the characters are feeling during the story.

The two wife-slash-mother characters play such an interesting role in the story – they’re somehow at the narrative sidelines, but they're also expected to keep very calm, even though they hold so much rage inside them. Could you talk about these characters?
Eleni, the character of the mother, is for me also one of the most interesting roles. She’s a woman with three minds. It’s about how she can manage all of these relationships, and it's also about how she is a part of this family-slash-gang. She’s part of this thing. She’s not innocent herself, either. But in any case, I didn’t want to develop a woman character that would be under the influence of her husband. I wanted to create a powerful woman character that makes her own choices.