Stavroula Toska’s Beneath the Olive Tree documents the untold stories of a group of women wrongfully imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. In this interview, Stavroula Toska touches on the empowering experience of women working together through trauma and telling their stories.
Where did your interest in documentary filmmaking begin?
It began the day that Olympia Dukakis, my late mentor, an incredible woman, gave me a book to read called Greek Women in Resistance, and I started learning for the first time about Greek women who had fought against Nazis during WWII and were later persecuted and accused of being communists, even though it was never proven for most of them.
I remember reading the book and discovering the diaries that Beneath the Olive Tree was based on and thinking that this needs to be a documentary — I need to find any of these women that are alive and put them on camera, and share their stories and their courage with the rest of the world.
As a young woman in Greece and then in New York City, I’ve always watched documentaries and felt that they taught me a lot about the world, but it never occurred to me that until that story landed in my hands that I would be behind the camera making a documentary.
What is your approach to interviewing documentary participants about difficult subject matter? How do you maintain sensitivity and still have an authentic conversation?
What ended up helping me was the fact that I had never made a documentary before, so I wasn’t the director that had gone to film school to practice her interviewing technique, I just had the desire and the thirst of a young woman who was born and raised in Greece, who knew nothing about all of this and was now looking at history in front of her.
These women really made a conscious choice not to be bitter about what happened to them. They conveyed this understanding that may be given the circumstances, they would have been on the other side. They were so open-hearted and funny during our interviews, once I let them know what my intention was and why I was moved by their stories, they sensed that I was being genuine and started opening up to me.
Has Beneath the Olive Tree been used in academic settings to teach about the Greek Civil War?
Last year we signed a deal with Docs Barcelona, a documentary distribution company based in Spain. They wanted to buy the educational rights to the film because they felt that it has tremendous educational value. It has become available to educational institutions in Greece, Spain, Germany, Chile, Colombia, and so many places around the world. We have a couple of institutions in America that have gotten the educational rights for their media library, and I hope that more will follow.
To be able to do work as a documentary filmmaker, an author, or a journalist, and highlight women’s stories from all over the world — helps us understand how the world sees us as women, how to move through the world, and how to empower ourselves.
What are the Toska Matrix’s upcoming projects?
We are going to be releasing Switch, the series I made about my work experience in the world of professional domination that will be released on YouTube. The goal for this project is to develop it into a TV drama series, so we’re going to be pitching that to networks and streamers.