Golden Dawn Girls

Golden Dawn Girls is a fascinating, disturbing poke at what makes an extremist tick. Beginning as a rummage under the bonnet of Greece's neo-Nazi/far Right Golden Dawn Party, it landed an unexpected bonus when the (male) leaders of that party were jailed – accused of founding and participating in a criminal organisation. – and their women, wives, partners, mothers, daughters were forced to step forward into the limelight.

Whether this focus on the female side of the equation was always the point, or whether it became so after the arrests left Golden Dawn effectively decapitated, is not entirely clear. What it does do is shift the focus from where such documentaries usually go to somewhere else entirely. So yes, there is plenty of evidence here that Golden Dawn nurtures some distinctly unsavoury views.

From the party official who had “Sieg Heil” tattooed on his arm (was that a Nazi thing? No: he just liked the sentiment. And the design) to the on-street thugs shouting slogans like “communists will be turned into soap” and “fuck the Jews!” there is more than enough here to convince any independent observer that this organisation at least leans toward Nazi politics.

Though in the end, debating the correct political taxonomy seems a little pointless. Interviewed early on, one of the women refuses to respond to a direct question about the difference between “Nationalism” and “Nazi”. Her evasiveness on camera will no doubt play well with those who regard Golden Dawn as dishonest and hypocritical. But this was just the first of many instances where it felt as though Director Håvard Bustnes was blurring boundaries between detached observer and engaged commentator.

Does it really matter whether a party whose members actively flaunt Nazi symbols and whose policies are racist, nationalist and exclusionary call themselves Nazi? After all, the Nazis themselves never adopted that title, preferring always to style themselves as National Socialist (Nationalsozialistische).

Far, far more chilling are scenes where one party member hands his children real guns and encourages them, as though it is all a game, to learn how to shoot; more telling, where the protagonists sit and comment on the evidence to be given against “their men” at trial.

This is just one of the issues with the documentary as a whole. It shows a side to a political movement that rarely gets shown. It raises questions about the role of women in such a party, as well as a much bigger question as to whether the party led by the women was in any sense significantly different from the party before - and after – the men went into prison. It also made some astute observations about how, the moment the men emerged from prison, the women once more took a back seat.

And yet...too much of this fascinating material was subordinated to the question of what to call them, to the point where the director's insistence on that single question started to get in the way. The director's role in this film is altogether unusual. It bucks the trend of drawing back and letting the protagonists get on with their lives as the director is very obviously there at various points ...asking questions, commenting on what he wanted to get out of a particular interview, directing, in situations where direction is not altogether appropriate.

In response, the women can be heard, time and again, asking for that direction: “what do you want us to say?” “What should we do?” “How should we sit?”

There is a sense – more than a sense – that with filming taking place over at least a couple of years, the director has grown close – perhaps too close – to the subjects of his film, creating a degree of intimacy that is not just intense but at times inappropriate. The film ends, as it begins, with the director asking one of the women to comment on whether she is a Nazi or not. She declines to answer. He pushes. She declines.

Yet this feels less the insistence of a probing interview, more something personal. The director has come to care about the answer and the exchange felt deeply uncomfortable. For the interviewed; for the audience.

Perhaps it can be argued that a director always provides implicit direction to a documentary – and therefore making it explicit is a more honest way to proceed. Perhaps. In this case, though, the result felt like too much personality, not enough inquiry.