6e4cb187 e463 4f81 b10f f2e3d719379a

Theo Angelopoulos

Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kythira)

Director Theo Angelopoulos Composer Eleni Karaindrou Cast Manos Katrakis, Mairi Hronopoulou, Dionysis Papagiannopoulos
Edition 2021
140' - 1984 - Drama - Dialogue: English, Greek
A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile.
Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the isle of dreams where one can dedicate oneself to happiness (or the pursuit thereof). In this quest within a quest, the tale of the father's return is told as if from the point of view of his son Telemachus and as if Telemachus were a filmmaker, as well as a middle-aged man with a son of his own. A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile. The man, away in the Soviet Union for 32 years and now stateless, finds himself at the beginning of a journey, not the end, and Angelopoulos evokes the past, present and future to bridge the gap between reality and the imagination. VOYAGE TO CYTHERA is about an old man - the country's leftist past - who cannot become reconciled to his country's present or perhaps it is Greece that is not ready to come to grips with its past. In the end the old man is set adrift on a raft headed away from Greece into international waters, with no home to steer toward, joined by his wife a latter-day Penelope who, despite the fact that this man is more a stranger than a husband to her after so many years, chooses to share the rest of her life with him and in doing so accepts all of his past, his sorrow, his politics and his failed dreams. It is a journey to the dark side of Greek history where it crosses paths with myth.

Voyage to Cythera reflects a kind of melancholy disillusion with the anonymous, amnesic place Greece became as it was absorbed into the ‘new Europe’.” - TIFF Cinematheque

“Suffused with that peculiar melancholy which Angelopoulos has made entirely his own.” - Time Out

With support of

Greek film centre logo 1

Image gallery

6e4cb187 e463 4f81 b10f f2e3d719379a

Credits

Directors

Theo Angelopoulos

Composers

Eleni Karaindrou

Cast

Manos Katrakis, Mairi Hronopoulou, Dionysis Papagiannopoulos

Scenario

Theo Angelopoulos, Thanassis Valtinos, Tonino Guerra

Director of Photography

Yorgos Arvanitis

Editors

Giorgos Triandafyllou

Producers

Theo Angelopoulos, Giorgis Samiotis

More info

Dialogue

English, Greek

Countries of production

Italy, Greece, United Kingdom, West Germany

Year

1984

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)