A telling example of Plyta’s ability to have her films openly discuss with those of her contemporaries can be found in I Am a Man and… I Will Do as I Please! (1960). In it, she tells the story of Nineta (Voula Harilaou), a woman constantly dealing with the unwanted advances of her male employers. Desperate, she and her friends come up with a bold plan: Nineta will disguise herself as a man to eventually secure a job. As they map out their plan, Nineta sings a line from the hit song “I Am a Man and I Will Do as I Please,” a popular anthem from Sakellarios’ film, The Hurdy-Gurdy (Laterna, Ftohia kai Filotimo, 1955). By directly referencing one of the most beloved films of the era, Plyta ties her narrative to the cultural zeitgeist, and reclaims the phrase for a woman forced to perform masculinity just to survive. Though Plyta herself never had to pretend to be a man in the industry, the scene reveals how far a woman might have to go to earn a living and how deeply the director understood the challenge of working in an industry that wasn’t made for her.
A few years later, in The Uphill (1964), Plyta revisits the issue of women navigating the male-dominated job market. But what makes The Uphill particularly intriguing is its origin. As we recently managed to acquire the first editions of Plyta’s two novels, we realized that The Uphill is actually an adaptation of Plyta’s own novel, Bound Wings (Demena Ftera), published in 1944 and dedicated, as the first page indicates, “to the girl that works”. Both in the novel and the film, Plyta explores the range of choices young women face as they leave school and step into adulthood, in a post-war Greek society when the workforce was gradually becoming more accessible to women in cities. The protagonist, portrayed in the film by the well-known Xenia Kalogeropoulou, remains firm on her decision to build a career, seeking financial independence and stability. Around her, friends imagine different futures: falling in love, marrying for money, having children or remaining child-free. Plyta doesn’t rank these paths; instead, she lays them out like cards on a table, presenting each one as a valid expression of desire, survival, or hope. And she does so with care, casting Kalogeropoulou, a major star of her time, as a woman chasing her own future. Through her, Plyta draws mass audiences in with a familiar face, only to offer them something unexpected. Reshaping the expectations stardom brought along was a method she returned to often throughout her career, as she got to work with some of the most popular and recognizable actresses and actors in the 1950s and 1960s.
All the above paints the picture of a revolutionary, self-taught filmmaker, an individual who had an acute awareness of the film business. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the notion of desired paths—those trajectories carved by precedent and iteration. How many women behind the camera would it take for a country to create such a path? One where female stories are not the exception, but the norm; where the names of women filmmakers are not to be found in footnotes, but in book titles? I definitely don’t know the number, but I do know that the name of Maria Plyta is among them. She stands beside the likes of Ida Lupino in the United States, Muriel Box in the United Kingdom, Kinuyo Tanaka in Japan, Aziza Amir in Egypt; pioneering women who carved their own desired paths in male-dominated industries. Now, it falls to us to revise the film canon, celebrate their names and keep those paths wide open for those who will follow.
