Mahi (greek female name also meaning battle) returns to present-day Greece and, through a TV interview, reveals that in 1973, during the years of the dictatorship, he was an officer in the Greek army named Georgios when he passionately fell in love with a young communist soldier serving at the Tripoli military camp. Their relationship was soon exposed, and both men were sent to military prison, where they were tortured and abused.
In the same interview, Mahi recounts that his wife at the time conveyed to him that he should forget her and their children forever. After the fall of the dictatorship, he left Greece, soon underwent a sex change operation, and moved to Germany, where she began a career as a singer.
She concludes her confession by revealing that, after her transition, she chose her new name in honor of her beloved daughter. Immediately after, we see the daughter, distraught, at the bedside of her beloved brother in the intensive care unit. Having convinced himself over the years that his father had died heroically fighting against the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, he attempts suicide after watching the interview.
When the two women, both named Mahi, meet for the first time, the younger makes it clear that she has been waiting for this moment her entire life, but if her brother does not recover, she will kill her. Until then, however, they will live together in the old family home, just like before.
Thus, right after the TV interview, without a single flashback to the past, the film truly begins—exploring the complex coexistence of the two women. It is an attempt to reconnect, after half a century of absolute silence and absence, the thread between a seven-year-old daughter and a father who, before their violent separation, shared a bond of deep, almost obsessive love.
Much will transpire before the two women become one in body and soul in the film’s unexpected finale.
Actors:
Betty Vakalidou, Elena Topalidou, Manolis Mavromatakis, Yiannis Oikonomidis, Michelle Valley, Yiannis Karatzogiannis, Lydia Fotopoulou, Rania Oikonomidou, Angeliki Papathemeli, Angelos Papadimitriou
Written and directed by:
Elias Giannakakis
Producer:
Apostolia Papaioannou
Co-producers:
Greek Film Center, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT S.A.), Athens Epidaurus Festival, Elias Giannakakis, National Center of Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME)
Line Producer:
Panagiotis Simopoulos
Production Manager:
Kyriakos Gikas
Director of Photography:
Claudio Bolivar
Edited by:
Dora Masklavanou
Production Designer:
Michael Samiotis
Set designer:
Myrto Daskaroli
Location Manager:
Yota Skouvara
Sound Mixing:
Kostas Fylaktidis
MAHI - Director's note
The film seeks to highlight what may be our only true refuge when all the absolute certainties that we believe define our lives have collapsed.
Georgios was a military officer during the years of the colonels' dictatorship—a profession of the highest prestige at the time. He was also the husband of a respectable woman and the father of two children, embodying the archetypal family model that had dominated Greece since its independence from the Ottomans in 1830.
However, in 1973, when he is arrested for a homosexual relationship with a communist soldier, his entire world falls apart.
He is court-martialed, imprisoned, tortured, and his wife conveys to him that he will forever be unwanted. He will never see his children again, especially his beloved daughter, seven-year-old Mahi at the time
Had this occurred in a Western or Scandinavian country, the outcome might have been entirely different. He might have even had the support of his family.
But in the deeply conservative Greece of 1973—where history casts a heavy shadow over people's lives, as it does throughout Southern Europe—Georgios is now cast out of a carefully built and enclosed paradise.
He leaves as a cursed man, having committed the ultimate transgression and been condemned to hell.
Fifty years later, she returns as a woman named Mahi—a singer, no less—wishing to die in her homeland as the person she chose to be. More than anything, she longs to reunite with her children, especially her daughter, whose name she took after transitioning.
This is where the film begins—without a single flashback to the past.
The public revelation of her story through a television program brings the trauma back to the surface in an entirely unexpected way.
Her far-right son, who had built his identity around the image of his military father, attempts suicide after watching the interview in the television.
This moment sets the true foundation of the film:
The fragile relationship between two women, weighed down by the son and brother fighting for his life in intensive care. But above all, the complete absence of connection between two people who once loved each other passionately—then as father and daughter until she was seven, and now as two women trying to piece together the severed thread of a relationship long presumed dead.
Their only guide and refuge is a love that has been violated and trapped in silence for fifty years.
