GREEK FILM FESTIVAL: The very best biographical documentaries achieve a two-fold greatness: they capture the essence of the individual, and they place achievements and influence into a historical and social context. Roy Sher’s My Sweet Canary is such a work and one of the best recent examples of the genre for its loving retrospective of the life of rebetiko songstress Roza Eskenazi, as told by the modern artists influenced by her talent and passion.
Eskenazi, known as the 'Diva of Rebetiko’ throughout Greece and Turkey in the 1930s, was the first Greek musical superstar of the modern era. Exhaustively researched, Sher’s film is set within the framework of a musical journey undertaken by three devotees of Eskenazi’s music: Israeli-born bouziki maestro Tomer Katz; Englishwoman Martha D. Lewis, a singer/composer of Greek/Cypriot heritage; and Turkish vocalist Mehtap Demir.
Sher’s use of archival material is woven expertly into the film to accompany the three travellers’ reflections on the singer’s life and music. Against the backdrop of major centres in which Eskenazi spent many years of her life (Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Athens), the filmmaker embraces her Sephardic Jewish origins as well as the defining influences upon her vocal style (including rarely-heard Sephardic folk song stylings, courtesy of Katz, and recordings of her Smyrneiko classics).
In lovely scenes, the three pilgrims break into song in the most inopportune of places (on a train or in the street), so taken are they by the memory of Roza.
My Sweet Canary also touches on Eskenazi’s untraditional upbringing and forbidden lovers, including a German commandant she coerced into saving family and friends during the Nazi campaign to exterminate Greek Jews, and a man nearly 30 years her junior, Christo Philipakopoulos, who would be the love of her life. Bringing a melancholy to the recollections is the story of Philipakopoulos’ widow, the woman whose husband Roza stole and would adore until she died. Now a spirited spinster with warm memories and a forgiving heart, her journey with the filmmakers back to the courtyard where she first discovered Roza and her husband together is achingly poignant.
The wailings and tragic lyrics of traditional rebetiko is an acquired taste, to be sure, but Sher’s film goes beyond the orchestration of Eskenazi’s music, traditional tunes that enriched several generations of Greek musicians and music lovers the world over. In the footage used by the director, we see the woman and the artist up until just a few years prior to her passing in 1980; she was a gracious but fiercely individual person, an unbreakable spirit. Sher, in conjunction with his on-camera talent, captures the elusive star-making essence of one of the most beloved talents in Greek musical history.
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