‘Stray Bodies’: A film that makes you think beyond your rage

An exuberant yet haunting road movie, “Stray Bodies” uses the trope of travel to explore the boundaries that religion and politics place on women, especially when it comes to their bodies. Greek director Elina Psykou’s latest film features three European women who cross borders and resort to “medical tourism” to get what they need because it is not available in their home countries: abortion, IVF and euthanasia.

Robin, who lives in Malta where abortion is illegal, finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand but doesn’t want to be a mother. Katerina and Gaia living in Italy are single but each wants a child. Kiki suffers from an incurable disease and wants her life to end with dignity.

Before the film’s premiere on March 12 at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Psykou was viciously attacked on social media, due to the poster for the film, which featured a naked pregnant woman wearing a veil and nailed to a cross. Speaking of the threats to herself and her film, she reported that her opponents, mostly far-right religious groups, had called for a protest and asked to cancel the screening, even though none of them had actually seen the film. 

“It was important to save and protect the screening, and the festival was very supportive, so they protected the screening,” she said in an interview. “We had riot police outside to make sure we could proceed and the government then banned all protests, which I didn’t want to happen. It’s not my style to forbid things and forbid people. It was a difficult moment for me, but at the end of the day I was happy because we screened the film and the audience loved it.”

Psykou’s style is definitely not about banning dialogue or controversy, in fact she encourages it and uses both humor and hubris to uncover the deep, absurdist contradictions in law and public policy that restrict women’s bodies and exist in Europe.

From the opening shot in Malta, Psykou lampoons the role of church and state in women’s lives, showing Robin doing a fake confession inside a Catholic church, followed by a woman taking an abortion pill delivered to her by a remote-controlled robot, to circumvent anti-abortion laws. When Robin breaks into a campy musical performance, lip-syncing to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” we know we are in for a wild ride into the depths of the existential prisons European women experience while demanding the freedom to live their lives.

Katerina, who lives in Italy and wants a baby, travels to Greece for IVF treatments. Psykou intercuts some of these stories with a re-enactment of the Virgin Mary receiving word she will bear a child, complete with classical opera. As Katerina crosses the bridge to the ferry that will take her to Greece, we are introduced to Gaia, already in Athens, proclaiming she is there to practice “procreative tourism,” which she has been doing consistently since 2018, taking over 700 pills and undergoing 250 injections. Riding on the top tier of a tourist bus through Athens, Gaia asks how and why, after having one son in a heterosexual relationship and then divorcing, she lost her rights. Was it after the divorce? Was it when she came out as a lesbian, or perhaps because she is now single?

Starting in 2016, Gaia’s home country Italy declared a “fertility day,” encouraging heterosexual women to give birth using a national campaign that underscored the biological time-frame for a woman, completely eclipsing the fact that some women who wanted to become mothers were denied this opportunity by law. Gaia asks, “How is it that I cannot have a child without having sex, but the Virgin Mary can?”

Director Psykou thought it necessary to include interviews from pro-family and pro-life conservative voices in Italy and Greece. “I didn’t want to just make an activist film – of course I had my opinion, but I wanted to provide space and have a dialogue with a different opinion – it was a personal need, I really wanted as a person to listen to them and hear what they had to say.” Yet what they have to say is enough to increase the women’s (and the audience’s) outrage. She interviews anti-abortion activists in Malta and the male head of an organization in Italy called The People of the Family, who states: “Not everybody can have what they want in life… this is a persistent trait of the society of opulence… no one could ever think of artificially building the mechanism of motherhood.” He goes on to preach about how the European Union’s founding treaty was signed in Rome, but the original vision of its founders has turned it from “mother Europe to a stepmother,” laying the blame for so-called moral failure on women.

“For me it’s part of democracy – and part of making documentaries, it was very helpful that I understood and all the audience will understand that the conservative party leadership uses all the arguments and vocabulary of the progressive agenda, for instance using the words ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance.’ Also, there is an economic question: Not everyone can afford to travel for IVF or abortions or euthanasia.” 

The film uses clever re-enactments of the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception to punctuate the surrealism of a divided Europe in very personal choices. But much of the tongue-in-cheek, agitprop approach slows to a halt during the scenes with Kiki, a terminally ill patient in Greece. She is first introduced when an Orthodox Easter procession passes her humble house at night, and the priest prays for her, sitting in a wheelchair. Breathing from a tube, unable to move her limbs, she is interviewed for the film using a special keyboard to answer. To the question, “Do you believe in God?” she responds, “In an unknown God.” “Do you think of death?” “All the time.” And she then says if euthanasia was legal in Greece, she would have already done it.

Still, Psykou insists on finding another terminally ill patient who thinks otherwise. Inside a Greek monastery, a young monk lays motionless in bed, and communicates as well via computer, explaining he was an athlete earlier in life and was proud of his body, but this led him to worship his body, and through his Christian beliefs, he has accepted that suffering leads to redemption. Against euthanasia, he also acknowledges that no one can bear living in a vegetative state, but his belief in God is what allows him to accept the “great divine mysteries” of life and death.

Seeing this monk in a hospital bed, tubes coming out of his chest, surrounded by icons, his young face serene (he even smiles at one point), reveals a deeper brilliance to the film.

While Psykou is certainly taking a strong stand for women’s rights, she still insists on giving space to the opposition, as if to insist these barriers are still very much alive and embedded in custom, culture, belief systems, even our own.

Psykou shared how she got the idea for the film. “Many years ago, about 13, I first heard that in Malta abortion was totally forbidden, and it surprised me because nobody talked about it or knew about it. Also cremation was forbidden in Greece. These two things – the beginning of life and the end of life – gave me this idea.” But it was not an easy film to make. People in Malta did not want to talk about abortion, even those who had left in the 80s to get one. “Even 40 years later they were afraid.”

A chilling scene in Italy, burying the fetuses from abortions inside a graveyard, is also amazingly shot, almost deadpan. Narrated by a deacon of the Church of Rome, this sequence serves to remind the viewer just what women are up against, this deeply ingrained belief, stemming from centuries of church doctrine and cultural practice. Arriving in Sicily for her abortion, Robin is filmed standing in “the garden of the never-born children,” having been driven there by her taxi driver, someone who looks like he stepped out of a Quentin Tarantino film. It is clear this is staged, as if to further emphasize Robin’s resolve under the weight of such intrenched societal resistance.

Throughout the film, women occasionally stare directly into camera, as if to directly challenge the European Union, which several people in the film remind us was started mostly for economic reasons, not to regulate women’s bodies.

Perhaps the ultimate message comes near the end of the film when Dr Erika Preisig, the euthanasia doctor from Switzerland, points out that doctors that perform abortions and doctors who supervise end-of-life suicide assistance don’t do it lightly, nor are they forced to do it. But those who want to do it, who are willing, should be allowed to, as there will always be people needing this medical treatment.

“Stray Bodies” takes its viewers on a journey from playful to powerful, moving from brevity about bodies to deep reflection about life itself. 

Psykou reflects, “I hope people will think about life, about what life is, be more open about different opinions, and be more free to open themselves to really listen to themselves and to others, and I hope they find a way to feel life more deeply.”

Amie Williams is an American documentary filmmaker and journalist.