Passing Drama is based on stories told by refugees living in the village next to the city of Drama in Northern Greece, who survived the exodus and genocidal politics of the Ottoman Empire between 1912 and 1925. In World War II children of these refugees had to flee again and escaped the German and Bulgarian occupation. Yet many, like Melitopoulos’ father, became forced labourers in Vienna and Hitler’s Germany. The narrative traces a diagonal path crossing four different national states from Turkey to Europe, reflecting a sound picture transmitted from one generation to the next.

Telling a refugee story, which has been orally transmitted, retold, re-memorised from one generation to the next, means reflecting on the subject of narration itself while considering the forgotten throughout the constructive process of narration, notation and montage. The voice melody has a substantial meaning here, serving as a narrative thread of transmission. We follow knots and threads of a woven montage structure of memory and recollection, visualised through the possibilities of non-linear editing.