Huesca Film Festival

Catalogue
37th Edition
2009


Those who are rapt in the indisputable beauty of his images and accuse Angelopoulos of making a pretentious, pompous and static cinema, obviously ignore the profound humanism underlying all his works, and that’s not surprising, after all he is a Greek. From the very beginning, Angelopoulos’ works draw their inspiration from two central themes: his personal experiences and the Greek reality. All his filmography exudes a profound social and political concern, (the dictatorship, the emigration and the exile, the frontiers, the war, the communism and its fall…) and also ethical (death, solitude, childhood and old age, paternity, the rural world, the exploitation of other human beings), always together with a historical quest of the identity of his distressed country in the background. His own vital experience breaklessly intertwines with the recent history of Greece and its very prolonged heritage. We already found in Reconstruction the elements that will identify him from then on: the eternal tragedy (the murder of the returned husband at the hands of his wife and lover, who remind us of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon) and a Greece very far from the cliché, the rural Greece in process of disappearance because of the great emigration in the 60s. In the 70s decade, pervaded by the spirit of ’68, left-winged and Brechtian, Angelopoulos came up against the harsh reality of the Dictatorship in Greece: the historical method, which Kavafis and Seferis used in poetry, shaped up to be the solution before the censorship. Once again the concern for the historical evolution of his tormented country and its effects in the ordinary people. In this context he gave birth to his ‘trilogy of history’, without forgetting his own experiences: so The Travelling Players comes up from his career in the Greek army, going around Greece from one end to the other to recruit young men. And inevitably, the tragedy (Aeschylus) + the tradition (Golfo as a hint to the beginnings of Greek cinema). It is the time of ideologies, of the pacifist dreams (remember the movement against the Vietnam War), of the hope of changing the world (as John Lennon, among others, proclaimed) through cinema. But disappointment came soon: the silence of history and God, a total silence. Angelopoulos took refuge in his family, in his newborn daughters, and he gave birth to his most human trilogy: Voyage to Cythera reflects that disappointment for the broken dreams, focusing in an old exiled communist (= the death of ideologies), The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist, about the archetypal topic of the search for the absent father (cf. Oedipus). In the 90s the Balkan War bloodily closed the agitated twentieth century. Once again the horror, the refugees knocking at the doors of Greece, the frontiers blowing up, as they have done before at the turn of the century. Angelopoulos cannot be indifferent to this new tragedy in the back room of his world and to the memories of his own childhood. The sudden death of Gian Maria Volontè during the shooting of The Gaze of Odysseus inspired his following film, an autumnal melancholic film: Eternity and a Day. The old poet (an obvious alter ego of the author) faces his close end looking for his original innocence. The little Albanian refugee will help him to recover his lost words. And the circle closes with a return to the origins: to the Aeschylus tragedy (the fratricidal confrontation between Eteocles and Polynices), to the beginning of the twentieth century, which shaped the present-day Greece: a land of blood, of emigration. The Weeping Meadow remind us of The Travelling Players, but it stars in Odessa, that mysterious Black Sea that the Argonauts crossed in their quest to find the mythical Golden Fleece and where some Greeks survive half-buried by history. In the latest episode, The Dust of Time, Angelopoulos visits Uzbekistan and ends up in New York, the new capital city of the world. The fall of the Twin Towers marked the ending of an Empire, of an era, a turning point in History. But the river we bathe in (in blood) is never the same, as Heraclitus the Obscure already stated. He was a forerunner of dialectics and of the eternal return, so present in the filmography of Angelopoulos, in spite of his apparent immobilism. History always progresses, but only with difficulty… where will it take us?

AMOR LÓPEZ JIMENO

TOPIO STIN OMICHLI
LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST

(GRECIA - FRANCIA - ITALIA) -1988- 35 mm. / Color / 127 minutos.

Imagen de la película
  • DIRECTOR: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • GUIÓN: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos.
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Giorgos Arvanitis.
  • MONTAJE: Yannis Tsitsopoulos.
  • MÚSICA: Eleni Karaindrou.
  • INTÉRPRETES: Tania Palaiologou, Michalis Zeke, Stratos Tzortzoglou, Dimitris Kaberidis, Vassilis Kolovos, Yerassimos Skiadaresis.
  • VERSIÓN: Original con subtítulos en español.
  • PRODUCTORA: Greek Film Centre, Greek Television (ERT-1), Paradis Films (Paris), Basicinematografica (Rome),Theo Angelopoulos Productions.

Little Alexandros and his older sister Voula, in order to exorcise their loneliness, invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. Every night they go to a train station to watch the departure of a train to Germany, where they have been deceived by their mother into believing that their absent father is living. One night they finally dare to get on the train.

TO VLEMMA TOU ODYSSEA
THE GAZE OF ODYSSEUS

(GRECIA - FRANCIA - ITALIA - ALEMANIA) -1995- 35 mm. / Color / 176 minutos

Imagen de la película
  • DIRECTOR: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • GUIÓN: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Yorgos Arvanitis.
  • MONTAJE: Yannis Tsitsopoulos.
  • MÚSICA: Eleni Karaindrou.
  • ACTORES: Harvey Keitel, Maïa Morgenstern, Erland Josephson, Thanassis Vengos, Yorgos Michalakopoulos, Dora Volanaki.
  • VERSIÓN: Original subtitulada en español.
  • PRODUCTORA: Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre, MEGA Channel, Paradis Film, La Generale d'Images, La Sept Cinema.

A Greek filmmaker exiled in the USA, known as ‘A’, comes back to his native city, for an the exceptional screening of one of his films, a very controversial one. But A is looking for something different: the mythical reels of the very first film shot by Manakis brothers, who, in the beginning of cinema, go untiringly across the Balkans, unconcerned about the national and ethnic differences, to preserve the testimony of a region and its customs.

MIA AINIOTITA KAI MIA MERA
ETERNITY AND A DAY

(GRECIA - FRANCIA - ITALIA) -1998- 35 mm. / Color / 132 minutos.

Imagen de la película
  • DIRECTOR: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • GUIÓN: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Yorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinani.
  • MONTAJE: Yannis Tsitsopoulos.
  • MÚSICA: Eleni Karaindrou.
  • ACTORES: Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Renauld, Achileas Skevis, Despina Bebedeli, Fabrizio Bentivoglio.
  • VERSIÓN: Original subtitulada en español.
  • PRODUCTORA: Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre, Greek Television ET1, Paradis Films, IntermediasS.A , LA SEPT CINEMA.

It’s Sunday and dusk-coloured rain is falling on Thessalonica. Alexander, a great author, is preparing to leave the house by the sea which has always been his home. He finds a letter from his wife, Anna, in which she speaks of a summer day some thirty years ago. Thus, Alexander embarks on a strange journey in which the past and the present are intertwined.

TRILOGIA: TO LIVADI POU DAKRYZEI
TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW

(GRECIA - ITALIA - FRANCIA) -2004- 35 mm. / Color / 170 minutos.

Imagen de la película
  • DIRECTOR: Theo Angelopoulos.
  • GUIÓN: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni.
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Andreas Sinanos.
  • MONTAJE: Giorgos Triantafyllou.
  • MÚSICA: Eleni Karaindrou.
  • INTÉRPRETES: Alexandra Aidini, Nikos Poursanidis, Giorgos Armenis, Vassilis Kolovos Eva Kotamanidou, Toula Stathopoulou, Michalis Yannatos, Thalia Argyriou, Grigoris Evangelatos.
  • VERSIÓN: Original con subtítulos en español.
  • PRODUCTORA: Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT S.A., Attica Art Productions (Athens), BAC Films S.A., Intermedias S.A., Arte France.

The film is set entirely in Greece between 1919 and 1949. It begins with the entry of the Red Army into Odessa and the flight of the Greek community there and ends up in 1949 with the end of the Greek civil war.

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