Famed Greek Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos Gets Retrospective in Los Angeles

The films of legendary Greek writer-director Theo Angelopoulos – whose “Eternity and a Day” won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1998 – are being screened at a two-month tribute in the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater near the UCLA campus in Westwood. The career retrospective opened on October 14 and will continue through December 18.

Called Landscapes of Time: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, the tribute includes all the director’s feature films and a selection of shorts.

Angelopoulos was a major force in the Greek film industry from the mid-1970s until his death in 2012. Drawing on his own experiences with the tumultuous events taking place in Greece, his films often center on characters whose personal journeys become intertwined with the tides of history.

While many moviegoers have found Angelopoulos’ films uncompromising and challenging, they are ultimately rewarded by his work’s unique storytelling, epic scale and stunning imagery – all factors that sustained the director’s wins at multiple top-tier film festivals over the years, including Berlin, Thessaloniki and Venice, as well as Cannes.

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In addition to “Eternity and a Day,” Angelopoulos’ movies include “The Travelling Players’ (1975), a controversial film that became a political pawn in Greece before a print was surreptitiously taken to Cannes; “Landscape in the Mist” (1988), best film winner at the European Film Awards; and “Ulysses’ Gaze” (1995), awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

The auteur’s final feature, 2008’s “The Dust of Time” (pictured above), starring Willem Dafoe, follows a filmmaker on a journey to make a film about his émigré Russian parents as it spans 50 years, moving across continents and between past and present.

The Angelopoulos tribute, presented under the auspices of the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles, is supported by the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, with the collaboration of the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies.