Theo Angelopoulos

Theo spent his childhood and youth in Athens studying law, but he moved to Paris to complete his studies and study literature at the prestigious Sorbonne University. It was in the French capital where he also studied film at the famous IDHEC. Back in Greece, the future filmmaker worked as a journalist and film critic in the newspaper “Demokratiki Allagi”, which would suffer the consequences of the colonels’ coup. There is no harm, that for good does not come, he would seriously consider making movies. For a while he was working on  Forminx Story , which was going to tell the story of a pop music group, but he didn’t get to finish the tape. His debut would finally be in 1970 with  Reconstrucción, which precisely recreates the circumstances of a real crime, with an almost documentary and everyday air, although establishing connections with none other than Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

The next three films by Angelopoulos,  Days of ’36  (1972),  The Comedians’ Journey  (1975) –which won an award at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight– and  The Hunters  (1977) make up a trilogy on contemporary Greece, a look purely political on the exercise of power, the first with complete clarity, the others taking as an excuse the adventures of some theater actors and the discovery of a corpse. Power is also the central theme of  Alexander the Great  (1980), the story of a thief whose title obviously equivocates with Alexander the Great.

Trip to Cythera  (1984) allows him to collaborate for the first time with Tonino Guerra, and contains themes that will be permanent in the work of Angelopoulos, such as the return and traces of the past, which make an impression on a protagonist who yearns for something that has been lost in a materialistic society. The script for Guerra y Angelopoulos, whose protagonist is a filmmaker, somehow the director’s alter ego, would win an award at Cannes, a festival where the filmmaker ends up becoming a regular presence, every time he has a film. Here the typical aesthetic elements of Angelopoulos are fully developed: slow and contemplative cinema, long sequence shots, sober and contained dialogues… The way in which he works with space-time coordinates makes him a unique filmmaker, who has sometimes been compared to Michelangelo . Antonioni , although his personality is unrepeatable.

After doing The Beekeeper (1986) with Marcello Mastroianni   , he delivers one of his great masterpieces with  Landscape in the Fog  (1986), the search for his father carried out by two children. He repeats his collaboration with Mastroianni in  The Suspended Step of the Stork  (1991), where he addresses the drama of the refugees.

Angelopoulos’ unmitigated masterpiece is undoubtedly  The Gaze of Ulysses  (1995), which follows in the footsteps of an exiled Greek filmmaker in the US, who goes on an Odysseic and Homeric journey homeward, while trying to find the whereabouts of an old and mythical lost film. Harvey Keitel manages to sublimely embody the director’s concerns and the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. The ground is therefore fertile for the festival of festivals to surrender at his feet, awarding him the desired Palme d’Or, and the event occurs in 1998 with  La eternidad y un día , which follows in the footsteps of a writer ( Bruno Ganz), seriously ill, who tries to capture the eternity of the title in a memorable day. His last work,  Eleni  (2004), should have been the first installment of a trilogy, which now can no longer be, the director has made his own entry into eternity.