L'Ordre

Jean-Daniel Pollet
1974. Greece, France. vo French. 44’

Lepers banished to a Greek island. A society that organises itself to resist rejection and abandonment.

In 1904, the Greek government decided to confine lepers, considered dangerous to society, in the fortress of Spinalonga, a peninsula north of Crete. There, while they await death, they seek a living. Raimondakis, the son of a lawyer, is their spokesman. He does not accept being locked up in handcuffs when he has committed no crime. He does not want to be pitied, he just needs love.

Pollet is commissioned by the pharmaceutical company Sandoz to talk about the last days of leprosy in Europe, which he transforms into a profound reflection on the differences between the disease and the supposed normality. The camera travels through the abandoned spaces of the Greek island of Spinalonga, officially called Kalydon, a leper colony from 1904 to 1956, the year in which an effective treatment put an end to compulsory confinement and the sick began to be transferred to hospitals in Athens.