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Theo Angelopoulos

The Hunters (Oi kynigoi)

Director Theo Angelopoulos Composer Loukianos Kilaidonis Cast Vangelis Kazan, Eva Kotamanidou, Giorgos Danis
Edition 2021
148' - 1977 - Drama - Dialogue: Greek
It is New Year's Eve. 1976. On a Greek island a party of bourgeois hunters comes upon a body, buried in the snow and miraculously preserved by the cold. By his uniform, he appears to be one of the thousands of partisans killed during the civil war and the hunting party, a group of the ruling elite, must now decide what to do with the body. When they disinter it, blood begins to flow from the wounds in the partisan's body and they carry it back to the lodge where the inquest begins. The film becomes a biting commentary, an extraordinary allegory for the persistence of guilt in which Greece's post-war Right is placed symbolically on trial in a series of tableaux in which the hunters are faced with their re-created sins. Merging poetic metaphor and historic reconstruction each member of the hunting party views the body on the makeshift bier: the colonel and his wife, the businessman, the ex-prefect of police, now a publisher, the ex-partisan who is now a wealthy contractor, the politician, the film actress who collaborated with the Nazis, the royalist noblewoman - all are forced to give an account of their actions since the civil war. Finally, they dream their own execution by partisans but awake to find it was but a collective nightmare provoked by the dead body of the partisan. In the gray dawn they rebury the corpse and with it, hopefully, their own guilt.
“The theatricality of The Travelling Players is here muted into a stylistic allusiveness, through which the composition of the frame is made to suggest a stage on which the hunters are put on trial and relive their past guilt. The film brings the historical arguments of Angelopoulos’s previous two films up to the present.” - Sight & Sound

With support of

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Credits

Directors

Theo Angelopoulos

Composers

Loukianos Kilaidonis

Cast

Vangelis Kazan, Eva Kotamanidou, Giorgos Danis

Scenario

Theo Angelopoulos, Stratis Karras

Director of Photography

Yorgos Arvanitis

Editors

Giorgos Triandafyllou

Producers

Theo Angelopoulos

More info

Dialogue

Greek

Countries of production

Greece, France, West Germany

Year

1977

Filmography

Theo Angelopoulos
Forminx Story (1965), Broadcast (short, 1968), Anaparastasi (1970), Days of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), The Hunters (1977), Alexander the Great (1980), Athens, Return to the Acropolis (1983), Voyage to Cythera (1984), The Beekeeper (1986), Landscape in the Mist (1988), The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), Ulysses' Gaze (1995), Eternity and a Day (1998), Trilogy I: The Weeping Meadow (2004), Trilogy II: The Dust of Time (2008), Mundo Invisível (segment, 2012)