From the edge of the city = Apo tin akri tis polis

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Pontians (Greek speaking Russians from former USSR) began to arrive in Greece. “From the edge of the city” examines the lives of these immigrants and their children who live literally at the edge of Athens’s immense urban sprawl. Though proudly Greek in their former country, they find that as immigrants they are considered outsiders by the Greeks. Faced with prejudice, unemployment and the cultural dislocation that comes with being migrants, many of the young Pontians turn increasingly to violence, crime and prostitution to survive. Utilising documentary techniques - hand-held camera, straight-to-camera monologues and interviews - the film examines the life of 17 year old Sasha (Stathis Papadopoulos), the brash fearless leader of a gang who sell drugs and their bodies in Athens’s red-light district behind Ommonia Square. Juxtaposing documentary sequences with dream-like evocations of Sasha’s life in the former USSR, “From the edge of the city” is a kinetic work that paints a bleak portrait of the realities facing immigrants in twenty-first century Europe. In Greek and Russian with English subtitles.