DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

‘Afemaxi’ in greek language means exsanguination. Exsanguination is the term for draining blood to a degree sufficient enough to cause death. Death takes place in abandoned premises, a metaphorical reference to the circular ambiguous domains of space and time and the enduring dimensions of human passion (pathos) and abandonment.

“Drained” follows the female character of Clytemnestra, who finds herself in an abandoned slaughterhouse, a reminiscent of her palace, and watches her life pass by through the deferred actions of her loved ones, questioning the story granted to her: When Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, Clytemnestra avenges their daughter's death by murdering her husband. Their son, Orestes, will commit matricide, to avenge his father’s death.

At the epicentre of the film, her lyrical yet raw commentary, is placed opposite the events in a re-enactment of the myth, abolishing both the victimization and the demonization of the woman. Clytemnestra becomes a dynamic opponent of the constant stereotypes that limit the woman to a permanently degraded position inside family and society opposite the undisputed male-power figure. A power that is defined inside the abandoned state slaughterhouse of Cyprus, in the village of Kofinou, where the filming and story takes place. A story that symbolizes the corruption of power, a violent and bloody patriarchal organization of society, also in correlation with animal abuse, and the fact that Kofinou was a Greek-Turkish bi-communal village, abandoned in the 1960s, whereas now houses refugees and asylum seekers.

Within the undefined space of a timeless crime, past and present, personal and collective memory, interfere with each other, the story of a woman and her family unfolds. The repeated blood cycle defines social and political extension. The line between justice and injustice, love and hate, rise and fall, slayer and slain is particularly and provocatively delicate.