‘Fuck The Polis’ review: FIDMarseille winner is a personal, lyrical portrait of modern Greece

Dir: Rita Azevedo Gomes. Portugal. 2025. 74mins

A misty voyage around the Greek islands becomes a celebration of beauty and the natural world in Fuck The Polis. A brusque, confrontational title conceals a poetic, impressionistic documentary from director Rita Azevedo Gomes reflecting her love of Greece and what feel increasingly like bygone values. Esoteric and dauntingly personal, the film may be a tough sell but winning FIDMarseille’s international competition grand prix should provide it with a foothold on the festival circuit.

An intimate love letter to Greece

Fuck The Polis takes its title from graffiti scrawled on a wall in Athens, and from a poem by Gomes’s friend Joao Miguel Fernandes Jorges that is heard at the end of the film. It serves as a stark contrast to what might once have adorned a public building, and also signals a slipping of the moorings of modernity. There is certainly a sense of longing in the film for better days and nobler instincts.

Late in the piece, Gomez provides the background story to Fuck The Polis. In 2007, when she received a ”very unpromising clinical diagnosis”, she left hospital and bought a ticket to Greece. It was a dream trip, taken under the dark cloud of her own mortality. Now Gomez has returned, 17 years later and seemingly hale and hearty. She is accompanied by three men and a woman who are only identified at the very end of the film as filmmaker Bingham Bryant, actor Mauro Soares, sound recordist Joao Sarantopoulos and director Maria Novo.

The group sail around the islands, and mix HD digital images with Super 8 footage as they capture the serene calm of landscapes steeped in history. Ruined temples and faded statues speak to the grandeur of the past. Beauty still lies in a swaying field of blood-red poppies, the bleached, scrubby hillsides and the vibrant blues of the sea. They take pleasure in the simple things, from a game of chess in a bar to lounging in a field and reading poetry. There is none of the pressure and bustle of modern living in these images, emphasising how the filmmaker seems to view Greece as a place of solace and healing.

Reflecting on past and present visits by Gomes, Fuck The Polis also recounts Jorges’ short story A Portugusa, a fictionalised version of Gomes’s experiences that is recounted at length in the film. Reading and the written word are a key component of the documentary as the central group recite stories to each other, often in couples. That includes poems by Keats and Byron and excerpts from Albert Camus’ post-war essay ’Helen’s Exile’, in which he talks of a lost connection to beauty and nature that is to the detriment of the modern world.

Long static shots of individuals posed for the camera or absorbed in the acts of reading and listening add to the film’s languorous pace and apparent desire to slow down the world. They also contribute to a sense of the film as a collaborative effort, forged as they all explored and immersed themselves in the islands of Syros, Mykonos and Delos.

Obscure in places and not always easy to grasp, Fuck The Polis emerges eventually as an intimate love letter to Greece and what it embodies for Gomes. She features traditional Greek dancing from a public performance in 2018 and recalls her first night in Athens in 2007 when she managed to attend a sold-out concert featuring singer Maria Farantouri. A reunion with the performer spans the decades, and is an emotional highlight of a complex, digressive work.