A refugee smuggling tragedy tears at the fabric of a Greek family in “Behind the Haystacks,” a touching and deeply involving drama that is the Greek submission for consideration as Best International Feature for the next Academy Awards.

The Middle Eastern conflict refugees are mostly in the background of writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s debut feature, a film that reveals the cultural and social rifts and weaknesses that migrants, fleeing wars and climate-change worsened economic strife, have opened in a troubled country that serves as a gateway to Europe.

The story is told within the frame of a lakeside summer picnic in a village on the border with Macedonia. Children playing in the water are shocked to find bodies floating in the reeds. And something about the way the men of the farming hamlet laugh this off, ask them if they know the legends about “water nymphs” and the like as the women look pained or appalled is just chilling.

We learn the “real” story of those bodies, life in this place and the differing attitudes of the locals to “outsiders” via three versions of what happened there, told from the point of view of indebted farmer/fisherman Stergios (Stathis Stamoulakatos), his devout Greek Orthodox wife Maria (Eleni Ouzounidou) and their 20ish student nurse daughter Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda), an aspiring singer bridling at the restraints of living under her father’s thumb.

Stergios is paying off a tractor and hiring an Albanian immigrant to use it to fertilize and cultivate his land, and driving back and forth across the border to fish the lake and sell his catch to a local butcher.

His finances, and those of the village farm co-op, are a shambles, mirroring those of Greece itself. Corruption, tax dodges and sloppy envoicing have him and many of his neighbors on the brink, Nobody is paying anybody else what they owe, and they’re all in trouble.

Stergios resists the offers of “help” from his hated, sketchy, strip-club-haunting brother-in-law Dmitris (Paschalis Tsarouhas), whose visits are unwelcome as he showers birthday cash on his niece, Anastasia.

That “help,” when Stergios is finally forced to accept it, involves smuggling refugees into Europe.

“If it gets out of hand you’ll be the one behind bars,” he’s warned when he gets belligerent (in Greek with English subtitles).

Wife Maria is in charge of fund-raising for a restoration of Saint Barbara’s, the parish church. The older priest orders that there be no church outreach for the poor huddled Muslim masses encamped and struggling to survive as they await escape or government help. Old emnities aren’t so much mentioned as felt.

Maria is as obedient to her priest as she is to her husband. But a neighbor, Georgia, has common sense compassion and ignores the priest’s un-Christian edict. Maria finds herself torn when she goes to the camp, hunting for Georgia, and sees the problems of the people there.

Anastasia is young, working her way into a career and straining to live a more lively life than the broke one her controlling, bullying father oversees. She lands a side hustle as a singer, but needs to keep that secret. She takes a lover, and that is also something her father cannot know about.

“Behind the Haystacks” is neatly separated into those three narrative threads, with that of Stergios as the most detailed and dramatic.

Proedrou sets up and reinforces the idea that the problems were always here — a stodgy, patriarchal society only as adaptable as the limited, stubborn men running things, “independent” and proud rural people who rationalize getting by via cheating, an ancient religion limited by ancient grudges it won’t abandon and outsiders who are to be ignored, unless there’s easy money to be made off them, dismissed and unmourned when things go wrong.

The three-act structure may be simplistic, but it works. The arcs of the various stories have a predictibility to them that doesn’t ruin the parable’s impact. The performances are compelling and lived-in.

And the detailed depiction of Greece beyond the tourist sites, beyond the headlines, out in the country “Behind the Haystacks” make this as timely and topical as any film up for Oscar consideration this year.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Stathis Stamoulakatos, Eleni Ouzounidou, Evgenia Lavda, Christos Kontogeorgis,
Dina Mihailidou and Paschalis Tsarouhas

Credits: Scripted and directed by Asimina Proedrou. A TVCO release.

Running time: 1:56