A review of the film “Lo” by Thanasis Vasileiou
The house is almost empty. Walls that have been hidden behind furniture and picture frames for years now play a role in front of the camera, with their cracks and stains. Thanasis Vasileiou enters the house of his childhood, but his entrance is not like that of a homeowner. He says he feels like a thief, entering a house without its rightful owners. His father is no longer there from that childhood, and now his mother is also gone; the son, now the heir, must determine what to do with this inheritance. The film’s narrative begins here: with a house that is Thanasis’s inheritance, and he must decide what to do with it. The issue initially seems simple:
“The house is in debt, and a decision must be made about whether to keep it or let it go. But the more he walks around the empty apartment, the more things that were not visible become present. The cracks on the walls, the places where objects used to be, the doors and empty rooms, each evokes an absence; a trigger for a memory, or even a mental story from years ago.” The grief for his mother is the driving force of the narrative, but the film does not remain in mourning. The mother’s death opens a door that has been hidden for years behind the people and objects in this house, and now the mother’s absence and the emptying of the house open a chest of memories that existed in this house, without ever being spoken about.
In some scenes of the film, Vasileiou himself is not directly present in the frame, but appears as a shadow on the wall or a faint reflection in the glass of the sideboard, and even in one scene, his hand is visible, and he acknowledges this. This semi-hidden presence is more than just a formal play with the image. The filmmaker is present in his own house like a ghost; not completely outside the narrative, nor its absolute owner. He speaks of a past that he has experienced, and a larger part of which he has constructed through silence, guesses, and the stories of others. His shadow on the wall is a picture of the director’s own position in the film: someone who wants to see the past, but is also part of the very ambiguous image that is falling on the wall.
The word “Shhh” or “Be quiet” in a dialect of the Greek language. The filmmaker recalls a childhood memory; his grandfather says something about his father’s presence in the military police during the dictatorship, and his grandmother immediately silences him with that word: “Lo.”
The conversation between the grandparents ends there, but for a child, the stopping of a sentence can be more terrifying than the sentence itself. What is not said does not disappear, but grows and grows in the imagination, becoming a terrifying story of an absent father. From that moment on, the image of the father is mixed with fear, screams, arrest, and the image of the torture of dissidents, and “Lo” becomes a symbol of the terror that has been transformed into silence; the silence of generations who experienced the years of the Greek military dictatorship. The fear experienced by the previous generation is passed down to the next generation not as a direct memory, but as a prohibition on speaking about it, and a silence that knows no end. This transformation of fear into silence is the most important theme of the film.
“Lo” is not about a generation that is only made up of heroes of the resistance or perpetrators of the dictatorship. The Vasileiou family, as the film tells it, were neither fighters nor torturers. They belonged to a large part of Greek society that lived, endured, and in many situations, remained silent during the dictatorship. In one part of the film, a documentary interview from German television is shown, which was made during those years, and many of the interviewees, in response to a question about the state of society, say that they have no opinion. The filmmaker also states from the beginning that he does not intend to put that generation on trial. Every scene is not meant to end in a confession or a dramatic outburst. The narrative is not about finding a guilty party; it is about understanding how silence becomes a way of survival, and how stories and mental images replace truth and reality.
In the film, the house is a symbol of the mother’s presence. Although the mother is no longer alive, her traces are everywhere: in the objects, in the books, in the choices she made, and most importantly, in the signs she left for her son. In contrast, the father is almost absent in this house. This absence becomes a bridge that leads the son out of the house. The son returns to the house to find his mother, but he must leave the house and enter the city to find his father. The house is the realm of the mother, and the city is the realm of the search for the father.
Vasilios remembers, from childhood, standing by the front door, counting cars, waiting for his father to return. This image, one of the simplest and most poignant in the film, teaches Tanassis that to find his father, he must leave the house. For him, his father might be in one of those passing cars. Years later, the filmmaker repeats this motif in other scenes: this time, not among cars, but in archival footage of government ceremonies and city streets, searching for his father among the crowds, uniforms, parades, or in a fleeting glimpse. The filmmaker is not simply showing the audience what dictatorship was like; he is genuinely searching for his father among these images. Perhaps he can be seen in a parade, perhaps on a street corner, perhaps in a moment when the camera accidentally captured his face. The film’s narrative subtly blends the personal and the political, telling stories of a country that has affected many families, without leaving any trace of these effects in the official historical record; a silence that has continued for generations.
Tanassis finds no answers to his questions in the city’s historical film archives. This frustration drives Vasilios to create his own narrative from the places he visits. He stands in front of a statue and talks to it: “You saw me eating ice cream as a child, did you also see my father’s parade? Did you see him confronting the regime’s opponents?” These questions may seem childish, but they are precisely what the film’s narrative logic is about. When a person is silent and there is no sufficient evidence of reality, places and city walls become imaginary witnesses. Buildings, statues, and streets should remember what happened to people, but they remain silent.
From this perspective, Athens in the film is not just a historical backdrop; it becomes another character. The house and the city are narrators of moments that were never recorded. The house is empty of objects, and the city is devoid of signs that could remind today’s passersby and happy tourists of Athens of the past dictatorship. But this emptiness is what drives the film’s narrative forward. The empty space on the wall reminds the filmmaker of the past, and the absence of signs on a street leads him to imagine the history of that place. For Tanassis, this shared space and this pervasive absence are the same thing: silence.
The film bridges the gap between personal and collective memory without reducing one to a simple metaphor for the other. The cracks in the house’s walls are not just flaws in a building; they are opportunities to tell a story. When the house was full of objects, these cracks were not visible. Now that the space is empty, the walls begin to speak. Grief has cleared away the objects to reveal hidden surfaces. A similar thing happens on the historical level: deletion, forgetting, and silence were meant to make the past invisible, but in Tanassis’s film, these absences become signs of the narrative.
The mother’s character is precisely the opposite of this passive silence. She doesn’t explain everything directly, but she leaves clues for her son. In a book that has been in the house for years, she has underlined certain passages and placed a letter inside. The book “A Man” by Oriana Fallaci, about Alcos Panagoulis, a famous fighter against the colonels’ regime, is not just a cultural artifact left by the mother for Vasilios; it is a time-delayed message. Decades ago, she marked certain passages in the book for her son to read at a later time. Unlike his grandmother, who “stopped” the word with “Lo,” she creates the possibility of continuing a conversation in the future through the underlined passages in the book. Here, the film’s relationship with the mother becomes more complex. Tanassis repeatedly uses his own voice in the form of a letter addressed to her, and the film itself is like the answer that he gives to his mother’s letter years later. The mother speaks to him through the text, the underlines, and the book, and the son responds through the film’s scenes. From this perspective, the film itself is a kind of posthumous correspondence; an answer to a recipient who no longer exists, but whose absence makes its creation possible.
Panagoulis is not just a historical figure in the film’s narrative structure. For the filmmaker, he becomes a symbolic “other father”: a father who stood against the dictatorial regime, in contrast to his biological father, who, at least in the existing narrative, accepted the regime and was once a member of the military police.
This contrast could easily have reduced the film to a simplistic moral dichotomy: a heroic father versus a compromising one. However, the narrative avoids this path. The filmmaker respects Panagoulis, but doesn’t replace his life with the legend surrounding him. The central issue remains the real man who was absent in Tanassis’s childhood and with whom he must now engage.
The symbol of the phoenix, the official emblem of the Greek military junta, takes on a particular significance in this context. In the regime’s propaganda, the phoenix was meant to represent rebirth, order, and the revival of the nation; but in the film, this symbol is juxtaposed with the mechanisms of forgetting and the acceptance of a pervasive silence. The regime constructs its own narrative of rebirth, while families are forced to create their own stories to cope with everyday life.
This raises a crucial question about the relationship between narrative and truth. Vassilis repeatedly emphasizes that he is telling the story as a “heir,” not just as a son. This subtle distinction is very important. A son can demand answers from his father; an heir must decide what to do with what has been passed down to him. Should he reveal the past, continue it, reject it, or accept a part of it? “Lo” is ultimately not about knowing all the facts; it’s about taking responsibility for what has been inherited from the previous generation.
As a result, the film’s narrative arc moves from material inheritance to spiritual inheritance. The apartment and its debt at the beginning of the story present a very concrete problem: what to do with the house left by the mother? But gradually, the question changes: what to do with the silence that has been inherited from the family? And more importantly, does accepting the inheritance mean endorsing it, or is it possible to inherit something, understand it, and give it a different form?
This question reaches its climax during the meeting with the father. In a typical investigative documentary, such an encounter should be a moment of revelation; the camera is turned on, difficult questions are asked, and the answers are supposed to solve the film’s mystery. But Tanassis chooses a different path. The father tells his story about the years of the dictatorship and explains that he had left the military police a few years before the colonels’ coup. This narrative neutralizes a large part of the film’s suspicion and reveals the devastating impact that silence had on that child’s psyche and memory. But for the viewer, a more important question remains: how should the memory of the grandfather be understood? The very sentence that mentions the father’s presence in the military police, and the grandmother’s immediate “hush.” Is the father’s narrative an attempt to whitewash a dark past, or did the grandmother commit a terrible mistake? What is the relationship between the narratives and the truth? This is the film’s most important turning point, and it illustrates Tanassis’s approach to narratives. Tanassis could have pursued the next piece of evidence, amplified the contradictions, pressured the father, and created a dramatic climax from the conflict between the two narratives. But he chooses not to. He and his father choose to remain silent about certain things and change the subject. In line with this strategy, the person who is always filming everything with their mobile phone turns off the camera in the presence of the father, and there is no footage of the meeting with the father in the film. In other words, the film’s narrative itself remains silent during the meeting with the father. This silence is different from the silence at the beginning of the film. The initial silence comes from fear and prevents questioning; the silence at the end arises after questioning and is a conscious choice. The film moves from imposed silence to deliberate silence.
This difference changes the entire trajectory of the film. If Tanassis had found a definitive truth about his father at the end, “Lo” would have become a story about solving a mystery. But the film deliberately keeps the conflict between narrative and truth open. The father has a narrative; the grandfather left behind a different memory, and the grandmother’s reaction reinforces the possibility of an untold truth. The filmmaker knows that something may still be hidden, but he prefers to accept the father’s narrative and stop the search. This acceptance is not a proof of the father’s innocence, nor is it an erasure of the past; it is a decision by a son and an heir to not sacrifice the human relationship to an endless desire for certainty, and to create a different relationship with his father; a relationship that he needs for his future. In one scene, Tanassis’s attempt to obtain his father’s identity card in order to complete his residency process in France is shown, which itself is a symbol of claiming an identity from an absent father; a father who now wants to benefit from the years he spent there.
Ultimately, “Lo” is not about the failure of truth, but about the choice of how to confront it. Cinema can rummage through archives, re-examine places, and juxtapose narratives, but it cannot fill every historical void. Thanassis doesn’t turn this inability into a weakness; instead, he incorporates it into the film’s narrative strategy, allowing it to continue. In the end, the protagonist calls his father and congratulates him on his 85th birthday.
Throughout the film, the form complements the content. The scenes are not intended to be classically dramatic. Thanassis avoids artificial suspense, ominous music, and explosive confrontations because the subject matter concerns people whose political experiences have largely unfolded in the most undramatic way possible: by continuing to live, looking the other way, remaining silent, forgetting, and moving on. Historical violence doesn’t always remain as a major event in their memories; sometimes, it becomes a habit of silence. The director doesn’t want to condemn, from the safe distance of the next generation, everyone who didn’t resist. Instead of asking,
“Why weren’t you a hero?” he poses a more difficult question: How does an ordinary person live with fear, and how do they pass that fear on to their child? The film’s answer is unsettling because it lacks heroes and villains. Most people were neither Panagoulis nor torturers; they simply lived, remained silent, and that silence itself became part of history.
At this level, the house and the city come together again. The apartment cannot testify, but its cracks are suggestive. The city also has no linguistic memory, but the removal of signs from it becomes a sign in itself. Both spaces seem to remember nothing, and the filmmaker has to build a story out of this very amnesia and absence of signs. Therefore, in “Lo,” the narrative is not an attempt to fill in the gaps; it is a way of living with the acceptance of those gaps.
The images of shadows and reflections of the director in the buffet glass are precisely for this reason. Thanassis can never exclude himself from this search. He is not an outside observer or a neutral witness. His shadow on the wall reminds us that every time we see the past, our own image is also projected onto it. He is telling a story about his father, just as he has been telling stories about him for years, even in his absence. The only difference now is that he is aware of the storytelling mechanism he is using.
In some moments, this metaphorical architecture is so deliberate that the film comes close to over-explaining. The connection between the empty house, the sign-less city, the absent father, and the historical silence sometimes comes together so completely that it takes on an overly symbolic structure. But the film pulls back just when it could have summarized everything. The decision not to continue the investigation into his father disrupts this conceptual order and allows a more genuine ambiguity to re-enter the work.
And it is here that the film’s ending takes on meaning. Thanassis finally calls his father and congratulates him on his birthday. This call, seemingly a small and even mundane act, takes on a different weight after all the film’s searches. The film began with a question about legacy and ends with a decision about a relationship. Reconciliation in “Lo” is not about erasing the past; it is about accepting a new reality in which there may not be a final answer, but in which it is still possible to choose to continue a relationship and to enjoy hearing the voice of a father who is part of one’s identity and roots.
At the beginning of the film, the house is something that might be lost, and the camera is a tool for preserving it. By the end, it becomes clear that the real issue was never about preserving the walls. What the filmmaker has inherited is a collection of memories, silences, fears, letters, and conflicting narratives. At the end, Thanassis is not simply trying to save the house, nor is he condemning or exonerating his father. He is doing something smaller and perhaps more difficult: he is accepting the legacy, without allowing it to define his entire identity. He delivers the answer to his mother’s letter with the film, transforming the family’s silence into a narrative, and then, just when the viewer expects a final revelation, he picks up the phone to congratulate his father on his birthday. After all this searching, reconciliation is not the end of the truth, but the acceptance of living alongside a part of a truth that may forever remain unspoken.
The title “Lo” also takes on a different meaning at the end. The first “hush” was meant to stop the conversation. But the film is made from that very word, and it transforms that silence into seventy minutes of storytelling.
However, Tanassis ultimately returns to silence again; this time, not as a victim of fear, but as someone who has the right to decide which questions to pursue and where to stop. Perhaps the most important difference between the two generations lies in this: “The first generation inherited silence, while the next generation strives to choose what to do with it and to create a narrative around that silence…“
