Film
Voyage to Cythera
Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα
A film director is casting an old man for a part. At the docks, an actual old man arrives: his father, a communist partisan who has spent thirty-two years in exile in the Soviet Union and now wants to go home to a village that has moved on without him.
About
The first film of Theo Angelopoulos's Trilogy of Silence, and the one that took the Best Screenplay prize and the FIPRESCI at Cannes in 1984. He wrote it with Tonino Guerra — Antonioni and Fellini's collaborator, who worked with Angelopoulos for the rest of his career — and with the novelist Thanassis Valtinos.
Manos Katrakis, himself a veteran of the Greek left who had been interned during the civil war, plays Spyros, repatriated after thirty-two years in the Soviet Union. His son, a film director, has been searching for an old man to cast; the film keeps the frame between the two roles deliberately unstable, so that the audience is never quite told whether it is watching a homecoming or its rehearsal. The village will not have him back, the state cannot classify him, and the sea eventually becomes the only jurisdiction left.
Yorgos Arvanitis shot it in the grey of a Greek winter and Eleni Karaindrou's first Angelopoulos score is here. David Thomson wrote that the beauty of the film has seldom been equalled, and the BFI lists it among the ten great Greek films. It is also the clearest statement of the theme running under all his work: exile is not a place you return from, it is a condition you carry back.
Top Cast
Manos Katrakis
Spyros
Mairi Hronopoulou
Voula
Dionysis Papagiannopoulos
Antonis
Dora Volanaki
Katerina
Giulio Brogi
Alexandros
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
-
Winner × 2 — Cannes prizes: Best Screenplay (Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Thanassis Valtinos), FIPRESCI Prize
-
Winner — BFI 10 Great Greek Films
-
Nominee — Palme d'Or — Cannes Film Festival (1984)
-
Cannes Film Festival 1984 — In Competition
