Theo Angelopoulos

Theo Angélopoulos is a film director and critic born in 1935 in Greece. He exiles from his country to flee the civil war and begins studies in Paris. He studies anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss and trains in cinema by rubbing shoulders with Jean Rouch at the French cinematheque. He will spend a year at the IDHEC from where he will be dismissed after a dispute with a professor about the shot/countershot principle that he keeps challenging. Despite this dismissal, he shoots with friends from IDHEC his first work En noir et blanc which will never be developed due to lack of resources.

Despite this dismissal, he shoots with friends from IDHEC his first work En noir et blanc which will never be developed due to lack of resources. He returned to Greece in 1964 and continued his interest in cinema, starting as a film critic in the left-wing daily newspaper Demokratiki Allaghi and in the magazine Cinéma moderne.

After his first short film Emission in 1968, he directed his first film The Reconstruction in 1970, awarded at the Thessaloniki festival. He quickly established himself with other directors like Voulgaris or Katakousinos as a major figure of the “New Greek Cinema”. He then began a trilogy of political films to denounce fascism in Greece with Days of 36 in 1972, then The Travelling Players in 1975 and concluded in 1977 with The Hunters.

Il remporte le Lion d’Or à la Mostra de Venise en 1980 avec son film He wins the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1980 with his filmAlexander the Great, where he explores the totalitarian tendencies within socialism. He then explores more intimate and personal registers with films like Travel to Cythera in 1983, The Beekeeper in 1986 or Landscape in the Mist in 1988. He directs a third trilogy with The Suspended Step of the Stork, Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day that obtains the Palme d’Or in 1998. With this trilogy, the filmmaker opens his cinema to the international by working with international actors like Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz, Wilem Dafoe or Irene Jacob.

After this trilogy, he takes a break from his career and returns in 2004 with Eléni : The Weeping Meadow, the first part of a trilogy on the 20th century through the prism of a love story. In 2008, he signed The Dust of Time, second installment of his trilogy Eléni. He died in 2014 on the set of The other sea following an accident while filming on set.