Landscape in the Mist

By 1988 Theo Angelopoulos had spent fifteen years making films about Greek history at the scale of the nation — occupation, civil war, dictatorship, staged in long takes that could run the length of a reel. Landscape in the Mist closed what is usually called his Trilogy of Silence, and it shrank the frame to two children. It took the Silver Lion for Best Direction at Venice and the European Film Award for Best Film the following year.

Voula and Alexandros believe their father is in Germany. The belief is enough. They board a train north and keep going, through provincial stations, roadside cafés and wet motorway verges, occasionally attaching themselves to a travelling theatre troupe that Angelopoulos had followed at much greater length in The Travelling Players. Giorgos Arvanitis shot it in a palette of greys and blue-greens that drains the country of postcard warmth; Eleni Karaindrou's oboe-led score supplies the ache the children are too young to articulate. Tania Paleologou and Michalis Zeke were both non-professionals, and the film depends entirely on their gravity.

It is the Angelopoulos film that converted people who found the earlier work forbidding. Critics who had admired him at a distance wrote about this one in the first person. It remains the most direct route into a body of work built on patience, and it does what the best road films do: it makes an entire country legible through the eyes of someone with no power in it at all.