A pensive, middle-aged filmmaker named Alexander (Giulio Brogi, but whose voice was dubbed in Greek by Theo Angelopoulos) on a shooting break from the filming of a semi-autobiographical feature that explores the plight of returning political refugees during the general amnesty of the 1970s, encounters a gaunt, yet ennobled old man selling lavender at a […]
A weary, expressionless acting troupe arrives at a near empty train station in a rural Greek village. The itinerant actors have arrived into town to perform a popular, idyllic, pastoral play entitled Golpho The Shepherdess. The actors seem indistinguishable from each other, and only their literary names, derived from the Aeschylus Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The […]
An off-camera narrator (Theo Angelopoulos) provides the sobering demographics of an ancient village in northern Greece – a population that dwindled from 1,250 people based on a 1939 census to 85 in 1965 – as a passenger bus traverses the remote, mountainous region on an unpaved road and becomes stuck in a water-logged ditch, requiring […]