The story of one theft The story of one of the world’s first hijackings of a civilian plane is told by Greek filmmakers with undisguised sympathy for hijackers. This, in principle, is not surprising, given the fact that a significant number of such crimes were committed for political reasons (or at least justified by these motives). Therefore, the attitude towards them depends entirely on sympathy or antipathy for the goals pursued by people who decided to take such a step. No matter what they say about the inadmissibility of air piracy and no matter how much they regret the real or possible victims, a certain part of society will always sympathize with them. Simply because it shares the ideas that pirates are guided by.
The seizure of the passenger flight Thessaloniki-Athens, carried out by six young communists in 1948, the authors of the film “The Loop” fully justify. To this end, the first part of the film paints a grim picture of the total terror that Greece plunged into with the outbreak of the civil war. True, this terror is shown only by the government forces, who shoot their opponents almost without trial and investigation, establish everywhere a regime of police dictatorship and wage a ruthless hunt for white and furry underground workers, guided by the instructions of the American imperialists. But then you have to put up with the political biases of the film director Costas Kutsomitis and his team. Communists, in their opinion, were on the side of good, their enemies represented a faceless Evil, capable only of killing, torturing and in every way persecuting those who aspire to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and other such abstract matters. When Evil was ready to tighten a ruthless stranglehold on Good’s neck, he had no choice but to try to escape the trap by cutting the noose in the most radical way that Good had. That is, by hijacking the plane.
Of course, the six heroes of the film are young romantics, idealists, dreaming of a new, fair society. They dream of breaking out of Greece, which has become a trap for them, only to be able to continue the struggle. They carry out the hijacking with minimal risk for passengers, some of whom secretly sympathize with the hijackers, and with the crew, after completing their escapades, say goodbye, almost fraternizing. Against this background, the actions of the authorities and the political police, again, are shown exclusively in black tones, the apotheosis of which is the hysteria of a police colonel who is ready to torture innocent passengers and pilots on the slightest suspicion of complicity, and who goes mad at the fact that he does not have such powers.
It is clear that an objective documentary picture of the events that took place in 1948 is not expected from such a film. He doesn't pretend to be. In the 80s, the idea of a revision of the attitude to the civil war prevailed in Greek cinema, and given that many directors (and actors) in the country sympathized with leftist ideas, then the appearance of films like “The Loop” should not be surprised. Unlike Soviet cinema, it is difficult to find optimism and confidence in the coming victory of communism. Where did they come from during the fall of the Soviet Union? Like another communist director, Nikos Tsimas, who directed, in particular, a historical and biographical film about the “Man with Carnation” by Nikos Beloyannis, Kutsomitis is pessimistic about the future. His heroes, finding themselves in a foreign country, in Yugoslavia, feel thrown out of life, useless to anyone, as well as a French veteran of the Spanish war who became friends with them. They are welcomed, they are ready to provide political asylum, but on the way out of the hostel there is a man with a face like two drops of water resembling the faces of Greek police philistines. If there is no difference, what are all these ideas worth?
However, the boys who hijacked the plane in 1948 still believed in these ideas. As probably believed in their ideas and those who sent hijacked Boeing in the towers of the International Trade Center. Where is the line between the first and second? How and when do romantics willing to give their lives for the happiness of others become fanatics who kill anyone who disagrees with them? I am afraid that such questions the director of “Loops” simply did not interest, although intuitively he asked himself, otherwise the picture would not have received such a finale. But with or without it, Kostas Kutsomitis’s film remains only a curious testimony of its time, telling about a little-known historical fact. It never became a cultural phenomenon.