Reflection on a Revolution (ROAR) presents “Utopia on the Horizon,” a documentary on the Greek debt crisis and anti-austerity movement, dedicated to those who chose to struggle.

In May 2011, hundreds of thousands of Greeks swarmed into Syntagma Square in Athens to protest against the firesale of their country, their labor rights and their livelihoods to corrupt domestic elites and foreign financial interests. In a matter of days, a protest camp was set up – organized on the principles of direct democracy, leaderless self-management and mutual aid – providing a glimpse of utopia in the midst of a devastating financial, political and social crisis.

On June 28-29, during a Parliamentary vote on further austerity measures, the state finally responded with brutal force, eventually evicting the protesters from the square and crushing the radical potential of their social experiment.

A year later, Leonidas Oikonomakis and Jérôme Roos – PhD researchers at the European University Institute and co-authors of the activist blog ROARMAG.org – returned to Athens to speak to activists involved in the movement and the occupation of Syntagma Square, as well as WWII resistance hero Manolis Glezos. What follows is this dramatic portrait of a country veering on the brink of collapse; and the people who chose to struggle in order to build a new world on the ruins of the old.

Thousands of people protested across Greece on Thursday against the next round of spending cuts, required in return for another bailout installment.

The 24-hour strike is the country's 20th national stoppage since the debt crisis erupted two years ago and comes as EU leaders met in Brussels.

Taxi drivers, doctors, teachers and air traffic controllers were among those taking part in the rallies.

Athens police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators throwing petrol bombs.

Syntagma Square was temporarily shut down but has since reopened to traffic; it was quite a small protest as Greek protests go and remained mainly peaceful,

Protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at police blocking off parts of the capital's main square before parliament. Officers responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

A 65-year-old man suffered a fatal heart attack during the demonstration, which was said not to be linked to the protests.

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Protests in Athens have turned violent as protesters clash with police on Wednesday. A demonstration outside of Parliament deteriorated when anarchists began throwing gasoline bombs and pieces of concrete at riot police. Police in turn fired tear gas at demonstrators. An estimated 50,000 people have joined the strike, which is the first trade union–led action since a conservative government came to power in June. Protesters have been demonstrating against planned spending cuts of $15 billion, which are required if Greece is to receive its next round of bailout funds, without which the country could go bankrupt in weeks.

Over a year has passed since anti-austerity protests and mass riots threatened to ignite full-scale revolution in Greece. Photographer Yiannis Biliris takes us back to those heady days of June 2011, walking the haunted streets of Athens, reminding people that a worse fate than uncertainty is things staying the same.

Lawmakers backed drastic cuts in wages, pensions and jobs on Sunday as the price of a 130 billion euro ($170 billion) bailout by the European Union and International Monetary Fund to avert a messy default that would send shockwaves through the euro zone.

The cuts include a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage and 150,000 jobs from the public sector workforce by 2015.

Scenes of running battles between police and rioters and flames engulfing cinemas, shops and banks underscored a sense of deepening turmoil in the country after more than four years of recession and two of punishing austerity.

The riots spread to Greece's second city of Thessaloniki, towns across the country and the islands of Crete and Corfu. In all, 150 shops were looted in the capital and 93 buildings set ablaze, wrecked or seriously damaged.

Occupy United claimed that 15 of the burned buildings were banks.

About 100 people - including 68 police - were wounded and 130 detained.

Athens city authorities said some of the wrecked buildings were of particular cultural, historic and architectural value.

The Attikon cinema, housed in a neo-classical building dating from 1870, was left a blackened shell.

The rioters were a minority, say various reports, yet others claim they numbered over 100,000 and spoke to the groundswell of anger among Greeks who say their living standards are already collapsing and more austerity will only deepen their misery.

Unemployment in Greece reached 20.9 percent in November, and half of young Greeks are jobless.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, photographs began circulating that identify several members of Greek parliament who were relaxing and watching a football game allegedly as the city of Athens burned.

Although protesters across the globe stand up and speak out often for very different reasons, today are united in recognition as Time Magazine's "Person of the Year."

Ladies and gentlemen, young and old, take a bow:

"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.

In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

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