Alex Sakalis (AS): At what moment did you and Theopi Skarlatos decide to make this documentary?
Paul Mason (PM): Well on January 25, when Tsipras was speaking in Propylaea, we had just finished making a 15-minute short documentary about the election and we just looked at each other and said ‘this is going to be amazing’ – the scale of the victory, the fact that they were clearly going to be able to rule with ANEL as a majority government, when most people had thought, probably not.
And what we found in those 25 days of election campaigning was a much deeper level of support and identification, certainly than I at least had realised, when I went into some of the so-called ‘fortress villages’ of Korinthos, to see the way that Syriza swung. One of the villages we filmed in went for something like 37% Syriza, where before it had been a New Democracy and PASOK stronghold. So we just thought: we’ve got to tell this story. We all underestimated the extent to which Germany was prepared to burn its own reputation in the pursuit of, let’s be clear, smashing a left wing government. That’s what it was doing.
