"Angela, Suck Our Balls"
2015 · 16m · United States
Directed by Theopi Skarlatos, Paul Mason
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
Director Theopi Skarlatos and producer Paul Mason present #ThisIsACoup, a four-part documentary series telling the story of how the European Union destroyed the first radical left government in modern history.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A title that sounds like a prank but lands as genuine provocation—Skarlatos and Mason take what could be a gotcha and turn it into something genuinely unsettling about desire, power, and historical amnesia. This is the kind of short that makes you uncomfortable in exactly the way consensus filmmaking avoids.
The essay film tradition here is deliberate and tense, with the directors working the gap between documentation and interpretation to produce something formally restless; the contemplative tone masks a confrontational argument about what we're willing to acknowledge.
There's a single editorial or structural choice—likely in how the title's provocation is made to mean something entirely different by the time the film closes—that transforms what could have been a stunt into a statement about complicity and looking away.
Reviews
Filmmaker and journalist Theopi Skarlatos came to her reporting on the Greek economic crisis from a unique angle — as both an insider and outsider. Skarlatos talks about the origins of her partnership with Paul Mason, who produced and narrated the films, and how episodic storytelling worked to reflect the cycles of elation and disappointment that defined the Greek public's response to the turbulent political landscape.