How our lives, quietly but drastically change after a single event? Set in present time crisis-hit Greece, Her Job is based on the true story of Panagiota. I was struck and deeply moved by this woman’s journey to a new identity just because she found a job for the first time as an underpaid cleaner, so we decided to tell her story in a film. How could this woman be so innocent and naïve to feel like she’s found a new self under such terrible conditions at work? The simple but genuine and unique tale of this woman’s journey through this first-time job, stood there as a true sting in our hearts and minds, revealing and upsetting.

Her Job is all built around the character of Panagiota, a woman who at the age of 37 decides to enter a “new world”, to act out of her element (her household) and stand on her own feet in order to help the family. Panagiota however is located on the opposite trajectory from the world and she ignores the terrible consequences of the new working conditions. It is so important for her to work that she doesn’t want to see what is happening around her. Even when everything seems to be crumbling down, Panagiota will still try to rise above the circumstances and keep her “upward” journey, experiencing emotionally, psychologically and physically the exhaustion from many divergent stimuli. Panagiota’s rise is simultaneously the failure of a whole system. The double-faceted dimension of Panagiota’s journey is the basic ingredient for the film’s taste and originality.

Her Job depicts a bleak reality, however, the film is not going to be a bleak melodrama. Despite the uncertainty, stress and pressure, the story is enhanced with unexpected outbursts of humour, moments of lightness and hope signalled by the heroine\’s smile. The tragic coexists with the comic element as in real life, creating a feeling of ‘madness of the every-day’.

What moves me in this story is that the heroes don’t have high expectations: their happiness is coming from simple things. In Greece today, you can feel the violence that it’s growing around us in every way (physically, psychologically, emotionally). Still there are people out there that stay positive about life, leading a quiet routine which gives them the right to dream with dignity; a job, a few friends, a coffee on Sunday. As for Panagiota, her unawareness, her kindness, romanticism and ultimately her rare inner strength, make her look like a modern Don Quixote. Panagiota is fighting against what at first seems impossible to her. Her dramatic need is to be able to keep her job in order to help her family. But through this process another greater and more basic need is awakened: the need to manage to live as an independent woman and enjoy obvious rights which she only now gets to experience for the first time.

I want to tell this story “as real as it is in real life”. In real life, situations are just developing in front of your eyes. However, in cinema you have to discover things all over again. So in order to achieve “my realism”, to capture those alive moments, we will create a photographically true-to-life depiction of reality, an almost naturalistic vision of an ugly-beautiful life so that an audience can easily witness, recognize and relate to Panagiota and her story.

The rhythm of the film will give the impression that what we see is happening right now. Sometimes it accelerates but at other times it slows down, according to the new situations our heroine is facing each time. We will be discovering together with Panagiota each time what is about to happen, living in the moment. The shooting will involve the use of long-takes that will help retain the continuity of her psychological state as well as refrain from breaking down the narrative’s inner rhythm. In other words, it will seem partly as a documentary where you go into a reality and you have no control. You shoot what is happening in front of your eyes. As if the camera takes the “wrong” position, as if you are shooting secretly.