ATHENS—Daphné Hérétakis’ What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move is a captivating hybrid short that explores the psychic dissonance of living among ruins in Athens, Greece. The film borrows its title—and its irreverent spirit—from Greek poet Yorgos Makris’s 1944 call to blow up the Parthenon. From this provocation, Hérétakis builds a vibrant patchwork of street interviews, musical interludes, and essayistic fragments reminiscent of Comizi d’amore and Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, purveying the vibrant intelligence of everyday Greeks.
Rather than offer a tidy argument, the film performs a kind of urban dérive, drifting through voices and gestures to uncover what lingers behind the façade of [Greek] heritage. Local routines are interrupted, echoed, and reframed as part of a larger choreography: people navigate gentrification, monuments perform silence, and the camera slips between documentary and invention. There is no single narrative to follow—only a pulse, a tension between...
ATHENS—Daphné Hérétakis’ What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move is a captivating hybrid short that explores the psychic dissonance of living among ruins in Athens, Greece. The film borrows its title—and its irreverent spirit—from Greek poet Yorgos Makris’s 1944 call to blow up the Parthenon. From this provocation, Hérétakis builds a vibrant patchwork of street interviews, musical interludes, and essayistic fragments reminiscent of Comizi d’amore and Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, purveying the vibrant intelligence of everyday Greeks.
Rather than offer a tidy argument, the film performs a kind of urban dérive, drifting through voices and gestures to uncover what lingers behind the façade of [Greek] heritage. Local routines are interrupted, echoed, and reframed as part of a larger choreography: people navigate gentrification, monuments perform silence, and the camera slips between documentary and invention. There is no single narrative to follow—only a pulse, a tension between reverence and rupture.
Hérétakis resists the weight of history by rendering it porous. In her Athens, no statue is fixed, no meaning stable. What emerges instead is a portrait of a city in despair—yet complicated, contradictory, and alive. By unsettling the usual distance between viewer and subject, past and present, What We Ask of a Statue perhaps becomes an argument not for preservation, but for participation.
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Robert Townsend in a still from Hollywood Shuffle (1987)
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