Biography
Born in Athens, Theodoros Angelopoulos studied law before attending French cinema school "L'IDHEC", where he grew close to Jean Rouch. Returning to Greece, he worked as a film critic before beginning his directorial career in 1965 with Forminx Story, an unfinished feature about a pop group, and then the 1968 short Broadcast (Ekpompbi).
His first feature, Reconstruction (Anaparastassi 1970), demonstrated his distinct style and first brought his name to the attention of critics at Berlin.
He then embarked on a loose trilogy on the history of 20th century Greece: Days of '36 (Meres tou '36), the four-hour epic The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975), which was honoured with the International Critics' Award at the Quinzaine des Realisateurs at Cannes, and The Hunters (I Kynighi, 1977). These films established a number of themes Angelopoulos has returned to repeatedly: the weight of history; a clinical examination of power; a Brechtian theatricality, where the status of the individual is subservient to that of the group; and a rejection of conventional narration in favour of an intentionally broken one, in which stationary cameras and sequence-length shots create an alternate sense of time.
Angelopoulos introduced another of his favoured themes in Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kithira, 1984), that of the journey. Centering on a filmmaker who returns to the Soviet Union after thirty years in exile, a stranger in his native land, it won the International Critics' Award for best screenplay at Cannes. Indeed the motif of the journey, usually a coming home, represents, for Angelopoulos, a quest for identity. A basic tenet of the filmmaker's writing, it recurs in The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos, 1986) - the last trip of an old man who has left his family - and Landscape in the Mist (Topio stin Omichli, 1988) - the voyage of two children in search of an imaginary father, which won the Silver Lion at Venice - as well as 1995's Ulysses' Gaze (To vlema tou Odyssea). Shot throughout the Balkans, Ulysses' Gaze won the Grand Jury Prize and the International Critics' Prize at Cannes. In 1998, he won the coveted Palme d'Or with his haunting masterpiece Eternity and a Day (Mia eoniotita kai mia mera).
Most recently, Angelopoulos completed the first instalment of a new trilogy, The Weeping Meadow, in 2004.
