Salonica (Poloni, 2009)

Those accustomed to documentaries of place trying to capture a geographical location through a cross section of its people may be slightly saddened to find that Paolo Poloni’s meditation on Thessaloniki is really more of a diaspora story than a Macedonian Dubliners. It’s fascinating nevertheless–and educational (when did that become such a bad thing, I wonder). If nothing else, there is a value in simply listening to these Greek Jews speaking Spanish and thinking about the ways in which our narrow stereotypes about the way people live and behave are grounded in a very limited perspective of the world and its history.