GOLDEN DAWN GIRLS

What has happened to Greece?

filmmaker Håvard Bustnes wonders at the start of this disturbing documentary. A film that explores one of the most drastic examples of the rise in right-wing politics across Europe.

In recent years, Greece’s image as a country of sunny beaches and friendly people has been overshadowed by political ideologies that are terrifyingly close to Nazism. With many prominent members of the far-right Golden Dawn party now behind bars, a daughter, a wife and a mother continue to propagate its message.

In front of the camera all three of them are carefull enough to avoid any slips of the tongue. But as they regularly stop the interview to make sure it went as they wanted, Bustnes leaves the camera running. This material is supplemented with disturbing archive footage of the violent methods used by Golden Dawn members. The result reveals an ever-widening gulf between clear facts and political image-making.

Golden Dawn Girls is a co-production with Upnorth Film, in Trondheim, Norway and NapaFilms, Helsinki, Finland

Variety wrote after our IDFA premiere: "Among the most chatteringly controversial and topical premieres at the fest was “Golden Dawn Girls,” Norwegian filmmaker Håvard Bustnes’s sharp, shocking study of the women driving the alarming rise of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. A sobering reminder of the broad international spread of the far-right surge that has also grimly shaped politics in Trump’s America, it nonetheless contained some of the fest’s wryest gallows humor — that I bitterly laughed more in “Golden Dawn Girls” than in any other film at IDFA is testament to what a serious, discomfiting and essential cultural position that documentary filmmaking occupies today."

Read more at:
https://goldendawngirlsdoc.com

PROJECT

Title: Golden Dawn Girls
Director: Håvard Bustnes
Executive producer: Nick Broomfield
Producer: Christian Falch, Jesper Jack & Liisa Karpo
DOP: Lars Skree, Viggo Knudsen
Editor: Anders Teigen
Script: Lars K Andersen
Outreach: Anna J Ljungmark
Duration: 95/58
Distribution: DR Sales
Partners: Upnorth Film, DFI, NRK, DR, YLE, SVT, VPRO, CHANNEL 8

STATUS: Premiered 2017 in main competition at IDFA