Thursday, April 28, 2011

PANORAMA OF GREEK CINEMA: Ulysses' Gaze


The Embassy of Greece, in collaboration with the Greek Film Center and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece is proud to present the Panorama of Greek Cinema series at the Avalon Theater in Washington, D.C. This series, which holds screenings on the first Wednesday of each month at 8:00pm, provides a unique opportunity for D.C. filmgoers to experience the best of Greek cinema.

On Wednesday, May 4 at 8:00pm, the Panorama of Greek Cinema series will celebrate its first anniversary with a screening of the film Ulysses' Gaze (Me to vlemma tou Odyssea). Written and directed by Theo Angeopoulos, the film received many awards: the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the Critics Award in 1995 by the European Film Academy, and the Top 100 Films of All Time list by Time Magazine.

Synopsis:
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 the 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 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...

The film runs for 176 minutes and is in English, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Serbian, and Romanian with English subtitles.



The Avalon Theater
5612 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20015
202-966-6000


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