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Who Swims Naked? January 2015. Greece is at a historic crossroads. The electoral victory of SYRIZA, led by Alexis Tsipras, ignites an explosive mix of hope, expectation and uncertainty. The new government promises to turn everything around. But an unpredictable course is just beginning. The first episode looks back at the rise of SYRIZA through the narratives of key figures such as Nikos Pappas, Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, Euclid Tsakalotos, Panagiotis Lafazanis and Giorgos Stathakis, and the first, crucial moves of a government that attempts to change the rules of the game. At the same time, Europe is waiting. Protagonists such as the then head of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem and the European official Thomas Wieser reveal the expectations, reservations and concerns of the partners as they prepare to meet a new government with a confrontational mood. At the epicenter, the new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has been stirring up trouble from the very first days.
Where is the money? What happens when a new government takes power and discovers that the state could run out of money within a few days? We enter the first, crucial days of the SYRIZA-ANEL government in 2015 - at a time when pre-election promises clash with the harsh reality of public finances. At the General State Accounting Office, the picture is shocking. The State's available funds are not sufficient for the upcoming obligations with only 1.6 billion euros in cash and multiple payments ahead of it. "It was a terror," recalls the then General Director of Budget and Fiscal Policy, Stavroula Miliakou, describing the moment when the possibility of salaries and pensions not being paid ceases to be a theoretical scenario and becomes an immediate threat. With rare archival material, revealing interviews and intense narrative tension, the second episode records the first moments when the Greek government is faced with reality. Because when the treasury is empty, every decision counts.
In the third episode of Eleni Varvitsioti and Victoria Dendrinou’s documentary series, “At the Millicent,” the negotiations are spiraling into chaos. Time is running out, the coffers are emptying, and trust between Greece and its European partners is crumbling day by day. At the center of the narrative is the then president of the Euroworking group, Thomas Wieser, the quiet but decisive technocrat of the Eurozone, who was behind every crucial negotiation. Through his testimony, it is revealed that, in 2015, many European officials began to believe that Greece was heading towards an uncontrollable path.
The fourth episode of Eleni Varvitsioti and Victoria Dendrinou’s documentary series, entitled “Codename Albania,” takes the viewer inside the secret plans that were drawn up for Greece’s eventual exit from the euro, revealing what they predicted and how close the country came to a historic reversal. For the first time, the Europeans' "Plan B" is revealed in front of the cameras, which they describe in chilling detail. From imposing capital controls to converting deposits into a new national currency, devaluation of up to 60%, skyrocketing debt and immediate humanitarian aid to the country.
How close did Greece come to exiting the euro in the summer of 2015? The fifth episode of the series “At the Millimetre” returns to the dramatic days leading up to the July 2015 referendum - the moment when negotiations between Greece and its European partners collapsed, banks closed, capital controls were imposed and the country’s future in Europe literally hung in the balance. At the heart of the story lies a defining question: was the referendum an act of democratic resistance or the moment when Greece found itself a millimetre before the unknown? In the end, was the real question in or out of the euro, as many protagonists in Athens and Europe are wondering?
The sixth and final episode of the documentary takes us to the most explosive days of the Greek summer of 2015 - from the week of the referendum to the crucial negotiations for a final agreement in Brussels. The harsh images of those days return: queues at ATMs, angry confrontations, rallies in favour of "YES" and "NO", fear, anger and a society divided between hope, numbness and panic. With the passage of time and the calm that it brings, the people who then made the most crucial decisions that determined the future of the country, speak openly, self-critically about what went wrong, what they learned from the crisis and what they would do differently today. Has Europe learned from its mistakes? What should be engraved in Greek politicians from now on, so that Greece does not relive the days of the crisis?
