We'll give it all back
GIAB (GIVING IT ALL BACK) allows you to visit the Acropolis and the British Museum from the comfort of your armchair: admire the six caryatids supporting the portico of the temple of Erechtheion; witness the dismantling of one of them on the orders of Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire to which Greece belonged, at the end of the 18th century; to follow it to London, where Elgin sold it to the British government, which in turn sold it to the British Museum, where it remains today, along with a good half of the Parthenon friezes; to measure the extent to which the idea of beauty in the West is still glued to that of the ancient ideal, and the extent to which Greece is still the fantasized cradle of this ideal - which is not without posing at least two problems: isn't it time for "beauty" to take to the sea, and for Europe to support the "cradle" it built and then scrapped, while celebrating its greatness?
GIAB opens with an uplifting question: what if we gave everything back?
Directed by Antoine Billet