The collaborative project The Broken Pitcher, developed by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian, traces the impact of financialization and austerity through a specific case study: a crucial meeting held at a bank in 2019, during which the foreclosure of a family home in Larnaca, Cyprus, was negotiated. Property foreclosures were among the austerity measures imposed on the Cypriot government by the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) following the 2012 financial crisis.

The Broken Pitcher examines the banking system and explores the possibility of rewriting the script of our interactions with it. Filmed within a full-scale reconstruction of the bank’s meeting room, the film reenacts the original scene. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case (1979, Iran), the reenactment is subsequently shown to people from a wide range of backgrounds, who are invited to respond to the question: “In your opinion, what should the bank employees do?” The filmed responses bring together perspectives from various stakeholders in Cyprus and beyond, including housing rights activists from Barcelona, Berlin, and Beirut, individuals affected by similar policies, public figures, lawyers, economists, and artists.