a lead...
Revolution has been sweeping Greek universities.
You may read about it here.
Tomorrow, being the good journalist and filmmaker I am, I will be heading toward the university to interview the students who remain at the University holding signs of protest and spray painting the buildings to talk to them about anything and everything. It's only about ten blocks from my hotel.
Labels: Gods In Disguise
posted by Jo Custer at 5:30 PM
3 Comments:
I was able to talk to one person at the "strike" today where for four months dozens of students (and one faculty member and one construction worker) have been sleeping, according to my anonymous source.
I got some footage of what's left of the university, but I was unable to film anyone at the sit-in. They do not like the media because they do not trust the media. A journalist from France had recently interviewed among them and apparently mischaracterized what's been going on.
They are anarchists, mostly, but no one person speaks for the group. Each day they assemble publicly, but no cameras are allowed. That is the only plan. Three hundred universities are involved in the strike which has shut down the university system in Greece. How they got organized, my source said, was not through any one system but through several ways which he didn't divulge.
He also seemed to think that there was considerably less backlash in Greece than in America where, he said, if a group had sieged a university like this (in, say, New York) they would get shot.
I said that that would depend upon who was watching. I also said that in America, anarchy is a myth. He rolled his eyes and said that it was not.
This is more than the privatization of colleges, though. My source said that Greece pretends like everything is okay when it is not. The job situation, the government situation and the media situation are all in need of reform. He said that there were so many people living on 600 euros a month.
I didn't have the heart to tell him just how much less than that I make. It wasn't relevant anyway.
Here are some photos from the protests.
Good luck with your work.
Thanks for the link -- I was able to get online for an hour while I was in Athens, but it cost me five eu and I had profs to keep in touch with, too...
Any newsstand that you find in Athens has papers that typically just have sports players on the front of them because, like us, they are sports-obsessed (although they take it to a whole new level)...and, much like your second anonymous commentor, are more in it for the potential violence than anything else. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same...
I'll give you a good write-up with what little footage I have when I get a chance, Sister. I'm working on a short documentary about modern Greek life that I'll need to find a narrator with a good voice for...mine doesn't record well.
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