The Fear

A prosperous farmer’s family lives out in the country by rules of its own. The man’s son attacks the young woman who works in the house, a deaf woman who cannot speak: he rapes her and kills her. What follows is the family making the body disappear and then having to live underneath the cover-up, which is where the title comes from, because complicity and fear grow together. Kostas Manoussakis looked directly at rural Greece in the sixties, at what was repressed there and at the difference class makes. The record describes the woman only by her disability and the son by an epithet; what happens here is a murder, and it is written that way. It competed at Berlin in 1966.