opinion

Strella: Cultivating queer joy in Greek cinema

by Krys Greene

Emerging from the late 2000s Greek Weird Wave film movement, Panos H. Koutras’s 2009 film Strella (known to international audiences as A Woman’s Way) harkens back to the origins of Greek weirdness in its retelling of the timeless Oedipal tale. Strella strives—much akin to its tragic counterparts—to embrace the uncanny, creating a landscape of society that entirely contradicts and defies the imposed limits of modern expectation. Indeed, Koutras never shies away from pushing the envelope, fashioning a film as nostalgically warm and familial as it is determined to interrupt any presuppositions audiences may bring to the films before them. In viewing Strella, we come to deeply understand the titular character’s vulnerable relationships with herself, love, and family, alongside the loss and healing she experiences in her life as a transgender woman. 

In its opening scene, Strella finds a man named Yiorgos (Giannis Kokiasmenos) in his final moments of incarceration. Even in the flashes wherein his freedom is impending, Yiorgos lingers, expressing what feels like one thousand goodbyes—marked by kind words, promises of face cream, lingering touches—exchanged with his now-former cellmate, Nikos (Argyris Kavidas). These fleeting, though altogether profound moments of tenderness barely last two minutes, yet they set the foundation for Yiorgos’s complicated ethos. We watch as Yiorgos, physically free, passes through gate after locked gate, signifying the forward, obstacle-ridden progression from the limitations of the known world and into one stretching beyond imagination, challenging the dynamics of expectation. He soon meets transgender sex worker Strella (brilliantly acted by Mina Orfanou) in the shared halls of their seedy Athens motel. Strella laughs when she introduces herself, explaining her name—a crossover of Stella with the Greek noun τρέλα (tréla, meaning madness), and qualifies that her friends “say [she is] a little crazy,” as if attempting to explain both herself and the quirks of the family that has re-named her (all translations my own; Strella 2009, 7:07). 

If, indeed, Strella is mad, the world that she has built only seeks to encourage her. She brings Yiorgos into her superbly normalized realm of queer joy, physically manifested within a brothel-turned-whimsical-apartment where Strella resides with her transitioning friend Alex (Minos Theoharis). Later, we, alongside Yiorgos, discover her other home—a countercultural underbelly full of gender-bending, cross-dressing, and hormone-fueled dramatists, all encaptured in a space aptly named Κούκλες (Κoúkles, meaning Dolls). In other words, we are presented with any ol’ gay club, but our proximity to its regulars creates the particularly radiant aura of Κούκλες. In Strella’s sparkling quotidian, we sit alongside Yiorgos, a newly minted addition to Strella’s carefully curated enclave, and we play the role of joyous witness as he accepts the glow of nightlife glamor swirling over him. All the while, the love in his eyes—our eyes—is as palpable as it is inevitable.

While Strella and her queer compatriots are not without their hardships, the film makes no pointless exaltations of suffering, creating a wavelet in an archive overwhelmingly rich in the grief and strife of queer individuals. Perhaps more importantly, Strella displays that the experience—whether bodily, socially, and/or emotionally—of being transgender is not necessarily a solitary venture primarily marked by anguish. Still, throughout the film, Strella appears to struggle with the mystery of her biological father’s whereabouts, indicating that in her attempts to re-identify and re-create herself within her familial structure, she has found the final snag to mend in the fabric of her life. Disconnected only from her biological family—“the plague of the trans,” as she remarks to Alex—, Strella has endeavored to create a world wherein her existence is not only welcomed but also normalized (Strella 2009, 22:52). 

Yiorgos, too, searches for the family he has left behind for fourteen years. The stark contrast to the transgressive grit of Athens becomes apparent as Yiorgos hops off the bus and lands among the sheep in his Peloponnesian village. Almost immediately, Κούκλες becomes the καφενείο (kafeneío; a traditional Greek cafe) and topics of conversation are limited to land sales and small-town gossip, a pressing reminder that the world outside of Strella’s—and outside of Strella—still exists, furious and dogmatic. Still, in accessing the parts of themselves molded by a world defined by its rigid boundaries, Strella and Yiorgos alike grapple with the possibility of forward progression amidst deep introspection, striking a balance between optimism and pragmatism within the multiple layers of the film.

To believe in joy—particularly queer joy—amid the cruelties of the world is, as Toi Derricotte reminds us, “an act of resistance” against the same hierarchies that insist upon and offer no alternative to (queer) suffering (Derricotte 22). So, too, does Strella proclaim that there not only is but also must be hope for joy and connection—even when these do not mirror societal ideals of family or kinship. While Strella and Yiorgos’s bond is certainly not without its pain, it is not a relationship or a narrative that suggests anyone—nonetheless Strella—must change to be loved. The characters of Strella, likewise, are swathed in love and community. What the scaled-down acting, cinematography, and staging occasionally lack provides humanity to the roles and surroundings of the actors, keeping all the idealism of the film’s story away from pure saccharine fantasy and, crucially, within the grasp of realism. Perhaps most significantly, the film uplifts what queer communities have been proclaiming for years: There are myriad ways to create connections that heteronormativity has shielded from view. Thus emerges the world of Strella, as dysfunctional as it is heartwarming—with a perfect dose of Koutras’s sublime Greek weird.

Works Cited

Dericotte, Toi. "Joy is an act of resistance, and: Special ears, and: Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly, and: On the reasons I loved Telly the fish." Prairie Schooner, vol. 82 no. 3, 2008, p. 22-27. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/psg.0.0107.

Koutras, Panos H., director. Strella. Memento Films, 2009.

Growing up, I was always afraid of being called it, without knowing “it” had a name. The name was “no sabo” and almost any Latino raised in the U.S. ought to be familiar, if not similarly wary of the term used to label younger-generation Latino Americans, teasing and shaming them for their poor Spanish speaking skills.  

Every syllable a strained attempt to conceal, every spoken sentence carefully structured and rehearsed in my mind, my Spanish was a point of vulnerability and pain. As a kid growing up in a Puerto Rican family, I wrestled with my Spanish speaking skills or lack thereof, trying to escape this nebulous yet daunting label. Only becoming aware of the “‘no sabo”’ label later on in high school, I came to abandon the Spanish language for nearly ten years— rejecting the language before my relatives could use it to reject me.

Little did I understand that experiences like mine and the phenomena of the “no sabo kid” were and continue to be shaped by the greater colonial forces within contemporary American society. 

In recent years the term “no sabo kid” has spun into a common social media trope, often appearing as the subject of Latino-created social media content including memes, skits and short videos. This content surrounding the “no sabo” label, as research suggests, reveals a deep divide in the Latino community. Built on the assumption that language stands as an unfailing meter stick for cultural identity, the trope allows Latinos that are less assimilated into American society to mock younger generations that have assimilated or “‘bought into”’ being “‘American.”’

But, how does this dynamic tie into colonialism?

In fact, it is this distinction between less and more assimilated— less and more ‘American’— that reveals the colonial dimension of the case of “no sabo” content. As scholar of U.S. immigration history Paul Spickard suggests, colonialism and immigrant assimilation are linked in that both hold cultural domination as crucial. In both colonialism and assimilation we see the distinction between a cultural “‘minority”’ dominated by the societal “‘majority.’”  As such in both cases, the minority is pressured to “‘assimilate,”’ conform, and give in to the “‘majority”’ for their own benefit. 

This colonial dynamic within Latino American communities is only further affirmed by the U.S. legacy of imperialism in its foreign policy. Findings from the Julian Samora Research Institute assert U.S. immigration from Latin American countries to be largely a “manmade” result of imperialist foreign policy practices in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries. These foreign policy practices include over 41 instances of U.S. intervention which succeeded in changing Latin American governments between 1898 and 1994. These destabilizing acts of  U.S. foreign policy in Latin America are cited as major causes of the historic waves of immigration to the U.S.

Given this colonial backdrop for the U.S.-bound Latin American immigration and cultural assimilation, it only makes sense that colonial tensions between the majority, or colonizer, and the minority, or colonized continue to shape the way Latino-Americans act in American society.

By allowing Latino Americans who have not or cannot conform and join the majority to mock those who have, “no sabo” content reveals a divide within the minority itself, that being Latino Americans. This divide amongst Latino Americans is shaped by their respective relationships to the majority— the white American. As such, by labeling certain younger Latino Americans as “no sabo,” “no sabo” content specifically places younger Latino Americans as closer in language and, therefore, culture to the white majority.

Political philosopher Franz Fanon identifies a similar colonial-linguistic dynamic amongst French and Creole-speaking Martinicans. In his seminal work on race and colonization, Fanon explains how some Aafro-Ccaribbean Martinicans position themselves as closer to their French colonizer’s by adopting their language, opting to speak French rather than their native Creole. In adopting the colonizer’s language, Fanon explains that the French-speaking Martinican alienates themself, ‘no longer understand[ing] Creole,’ and is ultimately faced with a choice: ‘get rid of his Parisian affectation’ or ‘die of ridicule’ by their Creole-speaking peers. 

Just as in the case Fanon analyzes, “no sabo” kids face a similar ‘ridicule’ from Latino-American communities for adopting the colonizer’s language (English) and as a result losing their own (Spanish). In fact, “no sabo” content itself functions as the media manifestation of the very ‘ridicule’ Fanon mentions. 

Seen in this light, “no sabo” content could be seen as content that champions anti-colonial sentiment by mocking Latino-Americans that have succumbed to the pressures of cultural assimilation. But, given the current division amongst Latino-Americans, as made obvious by the split in the “Latino” vote in the most recent presidential election, how productive can “no sabo” content be in the fight against colonialism if it only serves to further divide an already weakened minority?

Coatsworth,John. United States Intervention: What for? Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America, 2005, https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/united-states-interventions/

Coronado, Juan. Manmade Immigration Crisi Caused by U.S. Intervention in Latin America. Julian Samore Research Institue, Michigan State University, https://jsri.msu.edu/publications/nexo/vol-xxii/no-2-spring-2019/manmade-immigration-crisis-caused-by-u-s-intervention-in-latin-america.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Sin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Atlantic, 2008.

Guerra, Nick [@nickcomic]. Post about “How ‘No Sabo’ kids talk to their grandma.” Instagram, 25 Oct. 2022, https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkKDXhkpMvT/?igsh=X2FvZFJyNFhl.

Spickard, P., Beltrán, F., & Hooton, L. (2022). Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315780290

Stransky, Daniela, et al. "New media representations of Spanish heritage speakers: The case of# nosabokids." Communicative Spaces in Bilingual Contexts. Routledge, 2022. 32-44.

Rubyana [@irubyana]. Post about forgetting “to teach your kids spanish.” Instagram, 1 Jan. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1k3wl8vokQ/?igsh=QkFBVUlWWFpmRA%3D%3D.

@epthelatino. Post about “hanging out with your no sabo cousin.” Instagram, 1 May. 2023, https://www.instagram.com/reel/Crt9bERsj5m/?igsh=X3JwYWpUMjlI.