
Theo Angelopoulos
Ulysses' Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea)
Classics
176'
-
1995
-
Drama
-
Dialogue:
Macedonian, German, Albanian, Kurdish, Serbian, English, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek
Director:
Theo Angelopoulos
Composer:
Eleni Karaindrou
With:
Harvey Keitel, Erland Josephson, Maia Morgenstern
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film.
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece's pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history Thus he embarks on a search that takes him across the war-torn Balkans, a landscape of spectral figures and broken dreams, right to the heart of darkness: a damaged film archive in Sarajevo where his quest ends. Like a latter-day Ulysses he finds his "Ithaca", the missing, undeveloped film and is at last united with the work of the Manakia brothers... his gaze communes with theirs and another journey begins.
“Visually the film is quite exceptional. Shot in snowy winter, bombed out Sarajevo comes across as more harrowing and real than in any news report. An ambitious work, a mesmerising peek at the circle of pain and tragedy that is the Balkans; a place where history's cruel lessons go unlearned.” - Empire
Image gallery

With support of

Credits
Director
Theo Angelopoulos
Composer
Eleni Karaindrou
With
Harvey Keitel, Erland Josephson, Maia Morgenstern
Scenario
Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni
Director of Photography
Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos
Editor
Yannis Tsitsopoulos
Producer
Theo Angelopoulos, Eric Heumann, Dragan Ivanovic, Herbert G. Kloiber, Saimir Kumbaro, Piro Milkani, Ivan Milovanovic, Amedeo Pagani, Lucian Pricop, Giorgio Silvagni
More information
Dialogue
Macedonian, German, Albanian, Kurdish, Serbian, English, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek
Countries of production
Italy, Greece, Romania, United Kingdom, Albania, Germany, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Year
1995
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)