Eternity and a Day

Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day (Μια αιωνιότητα και μια μέρα) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1998, Angelopoulos's first major Cannes win after a long career that had included an earlier Grand Prix for Ulysses' Gaze. The film consolidated Angelopoulos as one of the most distinctive Greek directors of post-war European cinema; his subsequent work would extend until his accidental death during the production of The Other Sea in 2012. The Cannes win was the late-career major-prize recognition that his earlier work had seemed to deserve.

Alexandros (Bruno Ganz), a dying celebrated Greek writer, is preparing to leave the Thessaloniki house he and his late wife Anna shared and check into hospital for what he expects to be his final illness. He encounters a young Albanian street boy (Achileas Skevis) caught in the rapidly tightening immigration crackdown of late-1990s northern Greece, and across one last day in the city the two of them move through the snow, through Alexandros's memories of Anna, through the writer's unfinished translation work and the city's continuing border crisis.

Angelopoulos's collaboration with cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis (long fluid travelling shots, foggy snowscapes, the Thessaloniki bus stations and the seafront) produced one of the most distinctive landscape registers of late-1990s European cinema. Eleni Karaindrou's score, structured around the central piano motif, has become one of the most-cited European film scores of the decade. Bruno Ganz's central performance, in his only substantial Greek-language role, anchors the film with characteristic restraint.