Hands Up, Hitler

Two friends meeting again after many years begin to recount what happened to them during the occupation. What they tell is comic and painful at once: hunger, hiding, small tricks and moments face to face with death all belong to the same story. The film gives that period not directly as drama but through the mouths of two men remembering, and for that reason the tone of the account keeps shifting. It manufactures no heroism and shows what ordinary people did in order to stay alive. The account does not take what the two men remember as entirely reliable either; their stories come apart from time to time. Thanasis Veggos and Vasilis Diamantopoulos appear in Roviros Manthoulis’s seventy five minute Greek film, completed in 1962.