Making independent films anywhere is never easy, but it's that much harder in a country embroiled in a debt crisis.
All really good Greek actors are working at two theatres simultaneously and making films on the side just to make ends meet, says Yannis Sakaridis, who nevertheless managed to round up a formidable cast in his film Amerika Square. The good thing, from a film-maker's point of view, is that all the privation makes you nimble.
"You get really good practice when you work on a Greek film. We did this film in four weeks. A lot of people do it in less time. There is a lot of talent at the moment in shooting and acting, really good crews and I guess the weather always helps."
Sakaridis lived in London for 18 years, so he has a point of comparison with an arts environment that is relatively flush. "And I realise that Athens is really a very modern place for art, with amazing theatre, music and novels being written. People matured very quickly after the crisis, I think. You miss something but you get something. I mean, there is obviously not enough money. But there is a lot going on."
Amerika Square is an adaptation of a novel by Yannis Tsirbas that deals with another of Greece's immediate issues: the fact that this cash-strapped country is the first staging post for refugees from Syria trying to get to Europe. The eponymous square is an unofficial meeting point for those new arrivals, those hoping to leave and the so-called "travel agents" who will supposedly smuggle them across borders.
"In the '60s it used to be a place where all the artists used to be, but then it moved on," says Sakaridis. "In the last few years it's been like Casablanca."
In the original novel, Victoria Doesn't Exist, the story was told from the point of view of Nakos (Makis Papadimitriou), a fellow-traveller with fascist party Golden Dawn, whose personal sense of grievance is grounded in the fact that even in his late 30s, he still lives with his parents and can't hold or generally get a job. His friendship with Billy (Yannis Stankoglou) goes back to their shared inner-city childhood, but Billy is almost the opposite: cool, liberal, curious, possibly harbouring a secret wish to do something heroic in his life.
In the film version, Billy becomes the central character, watching aghast as Nakos becomes increasingly fanatical. He can't let him know about Tarek (Vassilis Koukalani) - the third major character - a Syrian doctor he is hiding in the basement of the cafe he runs. "We wanted to have three stories because we wanted to see the three representative ideologies and ways of dealing in that area," Sakaridis says.
The average Greek is sympathetic to the refugees, who have had significant support from the current Greek government, Sakaridis says.
"Because we are a refugee nation. Thousands of Greeks came from the east, or their grandparents or great-grandparents like mine. My grandparents came from Istanbul in 1922 so I've got in my DNA a sort of refugee mentality."
What is most remarkable is that Greece has produced a film like Amerika Square - now its national Oscar entry - which has been lauded by the international film press as "one of the best European films to date on the subject of immigration in all its painful implications". That's pretty good going on no money.
