In Holy Emy, a small Filipino community has made the Greek port of Piraeus its home. Sisters Emy (Abigael Loma) and Teresa (Hasmine Killip) do everything together. They share a little apartment, work at the busy fish market, and spend free time at their church. Teresa has learned to hide Emy’s crying fits. She doesn’t want anyone to know that her sister’s tears are made of blood.

Things become wholly unpredictable when Teresa succumbs to the flirtation of Argyris (Mihalis Siriopoulos), a local Greek man. Feeling her emotional base faltering, Emy must now confront the outside world with no buffer in between. An unexpected pregnancy and the awakening of Teresa’s maternal instincts exacerbate Emy’s sense of isolation. 

Coming out – raw and vulnerable – in the insensitive, money-hungry milieu of Piraeus is a complicated matter. And it becomes even more so as Emy’s natural gift for healing is gradually revealed. While the burgeoning therapeutic power of Emy’s body becomes a source of hope at a nearby alternative clinic, it simultaneously raises fear in Teresa and the danger of exploitation in Argyris.  

Will Emy hurt or save Teresa’s unborn child? The answer is not found in Emy’s even-keeled expression nor in her scant words. The answer will rise up from the fountain of her body – a fountain of blood.

Emerging Greek filmmaker Araceli Lemos’ Holy Emy premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival last August and won Best First Feature – Special Mention.

Even though the film shares some characteristics with the so-called New Greek Wave, which focuses interest on the disaffected and the weird, it is surprisingly emotional. Its original inspiration came from Japanese author Yoko Ogawa’s Pregnancy Diary. The “clinical observation” of that work and its lack of sentimentality and “psychologization” were points of attraction for Lemos. 

The director’s having witnessed an intense sibling relationship between her mother and her aunt while growing up in Athens, the story felt personal to her in other ways too. “I was interested to create the story of a relationship so co-dependent that, if it were to be broken, it would seem as if Emy would have nowhere to go.”

This dynamic led the director to think of her character as an outsider. To double down on this, she had the idea to create an outsider in an outsider community. Even though Filipino immigrants have settled in Greece since the 90s, Lemos didn’t know much about their culture and decided to do some research. “From the very first moment that I visited [the community], I knew I was going to set the story there,” she said, her eyes shining.

At a festivity in a church fellowship, she discovered a vibrant group of people, who were not afraid to express their emotions, to hold hands, cry, pray on their knees, sing and be loud to their hearts’ content. “The energy was very different from my idea of a church-going experience,” she went on.

There has been little tolerance for difference in Greece. “There was a lot of denial and secrecy. Everything had to be either in the closet or under the carpet,” she laughed. “There was no embracing of mental health or disability or immigrant issues, none of it! The moment something stood out, it was either to be feared or discriminated against, so everyone was trying just to blend in.” 

But the creator always felt that difference can be empowering. “The newcomers and the new generations have to cope with the question of whether it is better to shed the special aspects of their identity or to embrace them”.

Accepting differences, whether cultural or other, is neither simple nor easy. Immigrants, for example, “can easily be misunderstood because their personal references don’t belong to their surroundings,” Lemos observed. She has felt the gap herself as a Greek living in America.

With difference comes isolation. Lemos’ heroine occupies the center of alienation: alienation from the greater population, from her own ethnic community and now from her sister and her own self. Is this the fate of a “holy” person? Is Emy “holy” because she is different, or because she stands alone?

“I was interested in starting with a label,” said the director, referring to the title Holy Emy. “Then, during the film, you can either accept the label or not. I like for us to measure [Emy] up against holiness. The film is very much about how Emy experiences the way people see her, how she’s seen, how’s she’s labeled and interpreted. And how she is crushed by other people’s perceptions.”

Holy Emy holds up a mirror to questions one harbors inside. There is the issue of alternative methods of healing, for instance, and how effective they might or might not be. Lemos, once again, refrained from taking a hard stance. She went so far as to say that she believes that “there is a connection between our body, mind, and healing”.

A healer in the film says that he “helps things take their course,” and this much, said the director, felt true to her. “Sometimes what you do allows what has to happen, to happen,” she said.

Holy Emy poses questions, allowing them to stand out there alone, along with the possibility that the answers might be different from those immediately expected by the rational mind.

“I am an overthinker,” Lemos confessed. “I take one step and spend three days thinking about it. I always question myself, my intentions, my motives. So, I wanted to create a character who was like a child. Observing children is very liberating to me. They can have a huge tantrum, be horrible to everyone, but that doesn’t make them good or bad. There is just bottled emotion that has to be released.”

Indeed, one gets the sense that through her subtle directing method, as well as through the film’s open-endedness, Lemos is seeking to approach reality in an immediate and spontaneous way rather than through the intellect. “It is Emy’s body that has brought her to the experiences that she’s having,” she explained. “Her body is ahead of her, there’s no question of judging – am I good, am I bad? She’s just following the journey of her body.”

Furthermore, the body is an expression of raw femininity. “I’ve always been fascinated with blood and women,” Lemos revealed. The heroine’s bloody tears serve to take femininity one step further. “I like her to be dangerous, to have the potential of violence.”

She added: “Blood is an expression of violence in a feminine world. Tears are usually a sign of vulnerability, sadness. But for Emy, the tears of blood are not linked to her human but to her divine nature. When she cries, it is not a moment of sadness but a moment of power.”

Emy’s divinity, power and femininity all converge in her body and in a primal, genderless sexuality. “I found it interesting that [Emy’s] sexuality is linked to her healing practice,” the director explained. In the beginning, the heroine’s need to touch and be touched is fulfilled through her relationship with her sister: “They sleep in the same bed, they bathe together, they have each other’s bodies.” But when Teresa gets a boyfriend, loses her virginity and becomes pregnant, Emy is pushed away. That is when she turns to other “bodies at her disposal, of the people who come to see her for healing.”

Holy Emy is not defined by either subtheme. Rather, it is the visceral journey of a character who feels rather than judges, who follows her unconscious trajectory from powerlessness and isolation to realization and emancipation from the burden of preconceptions. At the end of the film, while “Emy is ready to create her own path outside of [other people’s] gaze,” we, the audience, may be a little more open to accepting her for who she is: neither good nor bad, simply completely exceptional.