1978, on his birthday, Stavros was set to get engaged to Matula. Instead, he was forced to embark on his first big journey. 2020, on his birthday, Stavros wanders around the city alone. It is the day that he doesn’t like to talk. It is the day that he reflects on his past considering how things would have been if he had made other decisions.
After their mother returns to the Philippines, sisters Emy and Teresa live within their tight-knit Filipino Catholic community in the port city of Athens. But when Teresa gets pregnant, Emy is increasingly drawn to other, more mysterious forces that live within her.
A nice mix of mystery, horror and arthouse drama.
Selected for the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presente competition.
Quote: […]The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.
From Strictly Film School: A pensive, middle-aged filmmaker named Alexander (Giulio Brogi, but whose voice was dubbed in Greek by Theo Angelopoulos) on a shooting break from the filming of a semi-autobiographical feature that explores the plight of returning political refugees during the general amnesty of the 1970s, encounters a gaunt, yet ennobled old man selling lavender at a kafeneon (a village cafeteria and lounge). Captivated by the humble vendor who perhaps bears a resemblance to his own absent father, Alexander follows the old man into the mist. Does Alexander, the abandoned son, believe this man to be his father, or does he, the director, envision this frail elder to be the ideal embodiment of the aging partisan (a part that he has been unable to cast) for his film? Reality becomes obscured in the metaphor of the enveloping fog. Soon, the old man, Spyros (Manos Katrakis) emerges from the harbor carrying his meager possessions – a suitcase and a violin – having returned home on a temporary visa after a 32-year exile in Uzbekistan. Politely but disaffectedly acknowledged by his adult children Alexander and Voula (Mary Chronopoulou), he is accompanied to see their mother, Katerina (Dora Volanaki), a nurturing woman who greets him with the simple yet poignant words, “Have you eaten?”. Nevertheless, despite Katerina’s tempered welcome, Spyros’ homecoming invariably proves to be overwhelming as well-intentioned relatives, now virtual strangers, amass at the house for the eagerly awaited reunion. In an attempt to help him readjust to his ‘new’ life, the family decides to travel to their neglected, rural home in a near-deserted village in order to reconnect Spyros with familiar images from his past. Communicating through a series of coded, bird call-like whistles, Spyros reunites with an old family friend named Panayiotis (Giorgos Nezos) at a graveyard populated by fallen contemporaries. It is a bittersweet reconciliation between two aging neighbors – once divided by the devastating civil war – that momentarily brings a sense of closure to the melancholic and emotionally burdened Spyros. However, when Spyros discovers that the village is in the process of being acquired by commercial developers for a proposed resort, his refusal to participate in the sale of the land reopens the town’s unhealed wounds towards the defiant and unapologetic rebel.
The first film of Theo Angelopoulos’ self-described Trilogy of Silence (that also includes The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist), Voyage to Cythera is a sublimely poetic, elegiac, and profoundly moving portrait of disconnection, aging, and obsolescence. Using a film-within-a-film structure, Angelopoulos interweaves personal observation and historical account into a compelling testament on the tragic legacy of the Greek civil war. Through Angelopoulos’ alter-ego, Alexander’s dual role as film director and Spyros’ son (who, in an oblique sense, may not be ‘acting’ in a fictionalized film), Angelopoulos correlates the abandonment, decay, and ruin of the Greek village witnessed by Spyros and his family with the subsequent apathy, callousness, and moral erosion of contemporary society encountered by Alexander as he attempts to find humanity and compassion for the uncertain plight of his disenfranchised and literally adrift father. Angelopoulos further illustrates the underlying hypocrisy of Spyros’ persecution as a forcibly uprooted and marginalized national (who is essentially stripped of his citizenship and reduced to refugee status in his own country) struggling to retain the spirit of a dying culture, even as the community is eager to collective sell its ancestral homeland – its figurative national soul – and move away. Caught in an absurd, existential limbo of bureaucracy and emotional desolation, Spyros’ interminable journey home, like the mythical voyage to Cythera, becomes one of human faith, connection, perseverance, and dignity.
Quote: Sofia is panicky, again. The Universe decides to contact her. An other-wordly dialogue. A planet symphony for Mars, where people dream awake and fight for love.
Screenings include: — International Competition Pardi di Domani section, Locarno Film Festival — Currents section, New York Film Festival — Experimental Shorts program, BFI London Film Festival
Quote: Seems like an ordinary trip to a remote beach. Four young women enjoy the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the sea and one another’s company. None of them is “Winona”.
Synopsis wrote: A journalist (Grigoris Patrikareas) is conducting an investigation regarding the refugees in Northern Greece and the immigrants who are detained at the border. He meets a man (Marcello Mastroianni) who resembles a politician who has gone missing. His wife (Jeanne Moreau) is summoned to identify him, but when she sees him she states that he is not her husband. The man’s identity remains unknown in a world where natural borders are not just a place of transition, but also an end, a no-man’s land, the end of a century.
Synopsis wrote: The film is based on an actual event, the murder of a Greek worker living in Germany by his barmaid wife Eleni and her lover Christos, who falsify the evidence of the husband’s return to Germany but are suspected by a sister-in-law and eventually accuse each other of the crime. A woman murders her husband, upon his return home after a long absence, with the complicity of the lover who has relieved her loneliness. Costas Ghoussis, an emigrant recently returned to his native country, is coming back from the fields, a shovel on his shoulder. He pushes open the garden gate in front of his house and calls his wife: Eleni! She does not answer; the reason: she is hidden behind the door of the kitchen with another man, Christos, a gamekeeper, the lover that she took during her husband’s absence. Just as Costas crosses the threshold he is attacked and strangled. Despite their precautions, a relative of the victim suspects them and alerts the police. The criminals confess their crime. The reconstruction is that of the examining magistrate, whose inquiries are interspersed with sequences of the crime – although the actual murder is never shown – and with a social documentary which a TV unit (including the director himself) is making about the crime and the village. From the very first sequence, audience knows who was killed and how and who did it. The film closes as it began, cutting back to the husband’s return to indicate an order which has been ruptured.
Synopsis: Angelopoulos’ first (completed) film won the Hellenic Association of Film Critics prize in 1968 for best short fiction film. It is a witty dismantling of media celebrity that uncannily prefigures the era of reality television.
Synopsis wrote: […]The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppre Acquarello. “Theodoros Angelopoulos.” Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/angelopoulos/.
Quote: Spyros (Manos Katrakis), a political refugee, returns to his homeland in his old age after many years in exile. His return is thorny, as even his wife (Ntora Volanaki) is like a stranger to him. Spyros no longer belongs to his society or his land; he is a man without nationality whose heart beats in the past, an Ulysseus who returns to a home that no longer exists.
Synopsis «Reality steals your dreams, and you steal it in order to dream. Reality steals your life, and you steal it in order to live.» A darkly optimistic film. Three versions of a single day. Three characters trapped in parallel universes. The invasion of the Thief will unite them. Each point of view produces a different story. The Sculptress has visions of Judgment Day, the Scientist holds fast to a fragmented memory, the Actor sees «Antigone» invading all space. Three philosophical viewpoints: Fate – Chance – Free Will. What do they have in common? The Thief progresses towards an answer. It is the human condition that unites us, imprisons us and frees us. The brotherhood of mortality. Whatever I spent, I had. Whatever I saved, I lost. Whatever I gave, I have.
Quote: A ban on physical contact in a dystopian workplace has turned interaction into otherworldly simulations. The suppression of touch transformed the boatyard into charged landscape of alienation and sensuality beyond heteronormative desires.
Kostas is an all-powerful tycoon, in love with his beautiful wife, Iro, who, however, is cheating on him with a young playboy, Nikos. The two lovers are planning to kill Kostas, and believe that the opportunity arises during a yachting regatta, where the crime can appear as an accident. Nikos, however, falls into the sea, and his body is never found. The police investigating the cause of the accident don’t believe the claims of Nikos’ fiancée that her fiancé was murdered. As it turns out, Kostas was aware of his wife and Nikos’ plans, and the disappearance of the latter was his idea for revenge. Nevertheless, the conflict of the married couple will be fatal for everyone.
The enigmatic old woman Rosa from Izmir and the powerful Ismael live for decades with the weight of a well-kept secret. An avid collector of Greek objects in Asia Minor, Dimitris, prepares an exhibition in a renowned museum in Athens on Culture of Nationalities who cohabited in Izmir before the genocide. In a trip to Izmir with the curator of the museum and his girlfriend Rita, he accidentally finds in a small antique shop a Greek wedding dress that is stained with blood. An old photograph, a wedding dress soiled with blood and a letter, become the reason to retract their story from the past.
A couple hires a migrant to be a surrogate mother on their behalf, and take her to their beautiful home. While he is at work, the two women become more intimate.
“Love, Love, Love” unfolds the chronicle of two couples who experience love and passion to its limits: the exotic and forty years old strip-dancer Stella with the loner ex-playboy and fifty years old Nick, but also of Stella’s teenage daughter Fani with the immature Hector. They all lack love and they want it more than anything in the world. Will love be able to change the fate of these people? Will love be able to beat something colossal as fate? And if it can, how far will they go for love?
Quote: Costas Zapas is back with its new cinematic extravaganza and perhaps his most audience friendly film to date. Manolis Kranakis, FLIX
Two hundred years after the Greek Revolution, a coup d’état is underway in Greece. A man named Odysseus hides in a theater for three days. On the third night, a woman named Athena finds him in his shelter. As the night passes by, they slowly transform into the mythological characters of the same name.
