In her award-winning video essay Passing Drama, Angela Melitopoulos addresses the process of collective remembering. She examines the experiences of a Greek minority deported from Turkey for political reasons in the 1920s. Melitopoulos interweaves the voices of people who fled their home country with interlinked visual material to create an acoustic picture that traces her own family history and that of the mass phenomenon of migration movements after World War One.
»In Passing Drama, escape as a subject of narration turns into a cinematic theme about narration and memory itself. History is presented as a machine which devours minorities in order to feed the majority. Drama becomes a stage for oblivion, oblivion, however, that hasn’t stopped touching people. Drama is also the name of the northern Greek town where numerous refugees from Asia Minor, among them my grandparents, settled after 1923, after having survived the trauma and deportations of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. For many of them, Drama wasn’t the last stop. Thousands of refugees and their children ended up in forced labour camps in Austria, or became guest workers in Germany yet another generation later. […] These guest workers spoke not only about poverty and civil war, but also about the persistence of their resistance, the partisan war, about camps and forced labour, and about a genocide offcially referred to as ›expulsion‹ since there is still no evidence of this organised crime even today.«
– Angela Melitopoulos

Awards for ›Passing Drama‹
Award of the Council of Europe – Video Art Festival Locarno 2000 | Award of the German Film Critics for Experimental Video 1999 | 1st Prize for Long Feature Video Art Festival Medi@terra Athens 1999