Demetra is a prostitute, which is what she calls herself, and she’s the remaining owner-operator of a faded brothel in Athens. “Isn’t my whorehouse in tip-top condition?” she asks documentarian Eva Stefani. But business isn’t good and Demetra knows why. On the phone to a friend, she laments: “No business in the brothels, imagine what the rest of the economy is like.” Filmed over 10 years, Days and Nights of Demetra K builds a lot of detail and colour into its swift running time. Demetra is an avid animal lover with loyal friends, a fierce mother, and a boy pal named Spyros, whose face we never see. Her endearingly baroque tastes, like the royal portraits that decorate her home, give the film a dense, old-world humidity. She’s prone to lounging topless in front of the camera and is rarely at a loss for words, preferring what she calls common sense over ideology, especially on the topics that concern her most as the president of the Sex Workers Union of Greece. A veteran of the country’s first licensed brothel, she states: “Imagine, we were legal under authoritarian regimes, and now, in supposedly liberal ones, they make our lives a living hell.” Speaking as an uninvited guest at a public conference on trafficking, which she naturally abhors, Demetra blasts the committee: “The ‘Ladies of Equality’—or rather, inequality—can’t put us all in the same basket,” she protests. Turning to the camera, she remarks: “Cooped up in their offices but they think they know best. And they get paid for this shit.” Coming exactly halfway through the film, it’s a comfort when Demetra leaves the beige halls of bureaucracy and returns to the mess of an ancient Greece.

Stir, May 2023