Wednesday, February 8, 2012

It's the people, stupid!

Like everyone else I guess, I have been watching the news on the Greek crisis. In the past months I have seen reports on street protests in Athens, news pieces on helpless - or hopeless?- Greek politicians trying (we are hoping) to find a way out of the mess. More recently however, all I seem to see when talking about Greece are the worried faces of Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy.

Then I read about a project and a great documentary on the Greek crisis and it opened my eyes - or maybe it just lifted some of the European fog- or should I say snow? -that was preventing me from seeing properly.

Here is the trailer:


Krisis - Trailer - The Prism GR2011 from niko on Vimeo.

The documentary - that will be released later this year - is one of the features in "The PrismGR2011" ("In January 2010, Greece was hit by an unprecedented economic crisis. The arrival of the IMF marked the beginning of a series of revelations, forcing all those connected to Greece to go through a process of self-reflection... The Prism is a collective documentation by some of the country's rising photojournalists, who bring to the project their experience as well as their own perspective" from the homepage).

It is a beautiful project and well worth sharing: it shows just how powerful images and words can be. But especially it has reminded me - stuck inside the Brussels bubble - that in the end we are talking about real people and how they are effected, more than hand shakes, spreads and press conferences.