Golden Dawn Girls: What Happened to Greece?
Meet the wives, mothers and daughters behind Greece’s notorious right-wing Golden Dawn party.
Editor’s note: This film is no longer available.
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.
So what has happened to Greece? How did the country come to vote members of the far-right Golden Dawn party into parliament?
Golden Dawn Girls looks at the party’s rise to power, using archive footage of their rallies, clashes with police, and attacks on immigrants.
When prominent Golden Dawn members are imprisoned and charged with operating a criminal organisation, their daughters, wives and mothers step up and continue to propagate its message.
Filmmaker Havard Bustnes gained exclusive access to the family lives of one of Europe’s most notorious nationalist parties – exposing the mindset, values and personalities of the people on the front lines of modern nationalism.
![Dafni was once a member of the socialist PASOK party, before following her son into Golden Dawn [Al Jazeera]](/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/e27c24d57db7449fab8987ca43a0e1b9_18.jpeg)
FILMMAKER’S VIEW
By Havard Bustnes
When I first met the people at the top level of the Greek ultranationalist party, Golden Dawn, back in 2012, extreme right-wing politics was still something most people considered as a relatively unthreatening ghost from the past or an obscure reaction to the financial crisis and immigrant situation that Greece found itself in.
With Donald Trump in the White House and nationalist parties climbing further and further up the polls all over Europe, I sadly found the topic of this documentary to be more relevant than ever before.
With unique access to the top leadership of Golden Dawn, I followed three women closely connected to the party during a time span of more than three years.
My ambition was to get as close as possible to the characters, to understand the mind of a modern ultranationalist. During the process, I suddenly found myself in a very dramatic period of time for not only the state of Greek democracy, but also for our three main protagonists.
With this film, I wanted to take a closer look at the mindset and values of the people on the frontline of modern nationalism.The film exposed this through a story that unfolded dramatically and characters who developed naturally during the filming process.
I use my own voiceover to guide the audience with important bits of information and to enable them to keep track of the context of the unfolding story of the Golden Dawn girls.