“Shall we go bury them?”
Mykonos 2011, cassette 87
For years, under the pretext of a never-ending film, four married girlfriends from Thessaloniki have been escaping and filming themselves away from their husbands. Together they add up the betrayals, dream of separations, and stifle their desires for dead lovers. They become a wandering Women’s Gallery that feasts on its pain, trapped in a stationary road movie. The years go by and the eternal girlfriends wallow in their roles self-indulgently, unable to find a way out of the passivity of mourning. Will they manage to free themselves from their gendered melancholy?
The Wedding Lament
A journey, an archive
or Fate?
The Mistresses of Mourning and Their History
According to Greek folk tradition regarding wedding customs, when the bride leaves her home, the women who stay behind sing for her. They perform “the weeping.” This wedding song is essentially a lament – the same mournful lament that women sing over a dead body. Very often even the words are the same.
The bride’s departure from her parental home thus symbolises her death as a daughter. She is wept over and mourned, as if her marriage heralds her death. With this ritual foretaste of her double liminality, both social and existential, her marriage journey begins. From now on, she belongs to the society of mourning.
And this is where our journey begins. Welcome, Sister Veroniki.
A Film
by
Pola Bousiou
“Whatever is done out of love is not moral but religious.”
“Shall we go bury them?”
Mykonos 2011, cassette 87
For years, under the pretext of a never-ending film, four married girlfriends from Thessaloniki have been escaping and filming themselves away from their husbands. Together they add up the betrayals, dream of separations, and stifle their desires for dead lovers. They become a wandering Women’s Gallery that feasts on its pain, trapped in a stationary road movie. The years go by and the eternal girlfriends wallow in their roles self-indulgently, unable to find a way out of the passivity of mourning. Will they manage to free themselves from their gendered melancholy?
The
Wedding
Lament
A journey, an archive
or Fate?
The Mistresses of Mourning and their History
According to Greek folk tradition regarding wedding customs, when the bride leaves her home, the women who stay behind sing for her. They perform “the weeping.” This wedding song is essentially a lament – the same mournful lament that women sing over a dead body. Very often even the words are the same.
The bride’s departure from her parental home thus symbolises her death as a daughter. She is wept over and mourned, as if her marriage heralds her death. With this ritual foretaste of her double liminality, both social and existential, her marriage journey begins. From now on, she belongs to the society of mourning.
And this is where our journey begins. Welcome, Sister Veroniki.
A film
by
Pola Bousiou
“Whatever is done out of love is not moral but religious.”
The Wedding Lament
“Shall we go bury them?”
Mykonos 2011, cassette 87
For years, under the pretext of a never-ending film, four married girlfriends from Thessaloniki have been escaping and filming themselves away from their husbands. Together they add up the betrayals, dream of separations, and stifle their desires for dead lovers. They become a wandering Women’s Gallery that feasts on its pain, trapped in a stationary road movie. The years go by and the eternal girlfriends wallow in their roles self-indulgently, unable to find a way out of the passivity of mourning. Will they manage to free themselves from their gendered melancholy?
A journey,
an archive
or Fate?
The Mistresses of Mourning and Their History
According to Greek folk tradition regarding wedding customs, when the bride leaves her home, the women who stay behind sing for her. They perform “the weeping.” This wedding song is essentially a lament – the same mournful lament that women sing over a dead body. Very often even the words are the same.
The bride’s departure from her parental home thus symbolises her death as a daughter. She is wept over and mourned, as if her marriage heralds her death. With this ritual foretaste of her double liminality, both social and existential, her marriage journey begins. From now on, she belongs to the society of mourning.
And this is where our journey begins. Welcome, Sister Veroniki.
A film
by
Pola Bousiou
“Whatever is done out of love is not moral but religious.”