Theo Angelopoulos

In the mid-80s, Aegokeros publishing house intended to publish a magazine about film and the theater. Theo Angelopoulos and Nikos Panayotopoulos had been chosen by the editorial board for the first issue. A summer evening at Angelopoulos house in the Mati area, Antonis Kokkinos and Yannis Soldatos recorded a three-hour interview between Theo and Nikos, within the frameworks set for them, in order to be included in the magazine. The interview brought to the fore their common course, even though completely opposite from one point onward. Thirty-five years later, the unpublished conversation has been found; both the tapes and the transcripts! This conversation stands as a valuable manifestation of the creators’ views regarding their own, until then, existing and future work, as well as a thorough insight into the New Greek Cinema, and into World Cinema in general.

a film that premiered at the cannes film festival

6.4/10

A segment from “Invisible World” (2012)

An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.

5.8/10

Eleven major film makers from Europe, America and Asia talk about Akira Kurosawa and discover surprising influences on their own work.

7.1/10

A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present.

6.6/10

A deeply personal look at the life of Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, one of the foremost representatives of Greek cinema. His life reflects the tragedies faced by an entire nation during the oppressive era of military dictatorship. It is a story of boundless ambitions, hope, love and the responsibilities that haunt every artist, even after death.

A City Runs Through the Festival is an anatomy of the Festival through the eyes of its own audience.

Greek Theo Angelopoulos traveling from Athens to Ostia, the Roman beach where Pasolini was killed. Far from there, in a Spanish train station, Víctor Erice wanders in an interview about the film resistance. And in Italy, Tonino Guerra, Ninetto Davoli and Nico Naldini lend his voice to the missing Passolini to close a historic triangle on film and solitude.

6.8/10

A woman confesses her love to a fellow filmgoer who doesn’t reciprocate.

A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.

6.8/10
10%

A film director, his relationships with women and the expression of his bitterly emotions about cinema and Greece

An interview with Japanese writer and poet Natsuki Ikezawa at Angelopoulos' home in Greece.

This is the first film of Theo Angelopoulos' trilogy. The story starts in 1919 with some greek refugees from Odessa arriving somewhere near Thessaloniki. Among these people are two small kids, Alexis and Eleni. Eleni is an orphan and she is also taken care by Alexis' family. The refugees build a small village somewhere near a river and we watch as the kids grow up and fall in love. But difficult times of dictatorship and war are coming...

7.9/10
6.7%

A documentary that focuses on Abbas Kiarostami's cinematic philosophy talking to himself and other figures, and also seeks the opinion about his works both inside and outside his homeland.

Alexander, a famous writer, is very ill and has only a few days to live. He meets a little boy on the street, who is an illegal immigrant from Albania. Alexander then takes the boy home.

7.9/10
9.5%

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. The results run the gamut from Zhang Yimou's convention-thwarting joke to David Lynch's bizarre miniature epic.

6.9/10
10%

Short from Lumiére and Company (1995)

"A," a Greek filmmaker living in exile in the United States, returns to his native Ptolemas to attend a special screening of one of his extremely controversial films. But A's real interest lies elsewhere--the mythical reels of the very first film shot by the Manakia brothers, who, at the dawn of the age of cinema, tirelessly criss-crossed the Balkans and, without regard for national and ethnic strife, recorded the region's history and customs. Did these primitive, never-developed images really exist?

7.6/10
3.1%

Theo Angelopoulos recalls the defining moment in 1964 that led to him to live his entire life in Greece, and explores the concept of borders in his work - as the limits of existence, of life and death, of language and communication. “Narrowing down the borders narrows the communication, stretches the differences, magnifies oppositions, magnifies reasons for war, magnifies the refugees, magnifies the internal exile... In reality a civil war leaves behind wounds which cannot easily be healed and they revive, like ghosts, or like recurrent nightmares, during the long nights which have dogged Greek society for years.”

Alexandre, a TV reporter, is working for a few days in a border town, where a lot of refugees from Albania, Turkey and Kurdistan are packed in. Among them, he notices an old man and thinks he is an important Greek politician who disappeared mysteriously a few years ago. Back in Athens, he asks this politician's former wife to come and identify him. A slow and dry meditation about inhumanity of borders.

7.5/10

Two children search for their father who is supposed to live in Germany. Their obsession for this father figure will take them to the boundaries between childhood and adolescence.

8/10
7.5%

A bee keeper, Spiros, travels from the north to the south of Greece with his bees to meet the spring.

7.4/10

An old communist returns to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union. However, things aren't the way he had hoped for.

7.8/10

Greek director Theo Angelopoulos takes the viewer on a tour through Athens in this episode of the TV series Capitali culturali d'Europa.

7.1/10

A documentary shown on Greek television in 1981, that describes the plight of Greek villages abandoned by their inhabitants. Some scenes from this film were rewritten into Voyage to Cythera.

3.5/10

Based on some historical events, the film gives a romanticized biography of Theodoros Kolokotronis, a Greek historical hero serving as a metaphor for Greece herself. Based on a circular view of history, the film presents conflicting ideologies - primitive communism, anarchism, chiefdom or kingdom, personality cult - and shows the institutions of property and power in a bad light.

7.6/10

During a hunting party on New Year's Eve 1976, five representatives of the bourgeoisie encounter with their companion the body of a partisan from the Civil War of the late forties. What they are most confused about is the fact that the corpse that lies at their feet is still bleeding…

7.5/10

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou) plots revenge on her mother (Aliki Georgouli) for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis), a young anti-fascist rebel.

8/10
8.6%

The assassin of a prominent trade unionist takes a conservative MP hostage and the government prevaricates over tactics so as not to alienate potential political allies.

6.9/10

A magistrate reconstructs the murder of Costas Ghoussis, a labourer who was killed by his wife and her lover.

7.3/10

In this political drama, a journalist accused as a conspirator in the murder of an American colleague is released for lack of evidence, and then searches for the true culprits. Inspired by the true events of the murder of American journalist George Polk, this film was shot in 1967 and was banned by the coming military dictatorship in Greece. It had only been shown abroad, until it premiered in 1974 after the dictatorship's fall .

7.5/10

The team of journalists of a radio show asks women on the street for their definition of the ideal man in order to conduct a search for someone to fill the bill, a specimen who has all these characteristics. The lucky guy will spend a few hours in the company of a well-known movie star

6.3/10

Theo Angelopoulos: A Lifework in Film

A journey through history

7.1/10