Giorgos Arvanitis

An approach to the phenomenon of Thanasis Vengos, the man and the artist, through film excerpts, testimonies of his collaborators and relatives and analyses of his symbolic role in the post-war modern Greek reality. Thanasis Vengos, for more than fifty years, was one of the most important actors in Greece. His films and lines are written in history, raising more than three generations of Greeks.

Theo Angelopoulos recalls the defining moment in 1964 that led to him to live his entire life in Greece, and explores the concept of borders in his work - as the limits of existence, of life and death, of language and communication. “Narrowing down the borders narrows the communication, stretches the differences, magnifies oppositions, magnifies reasons for war, magnifies the refugees, magnifies the internal exile... In reality a civil war leaves behind wounds which cannot easily be healed and they revive, like ghosts, or like recurrent nightmares, during the long nights which have dogged Greek society for years.”

A doc made during the nightmarish filming of The Suspended Step of the Stork at Florina.

Michel Demopoulos directed only one film in his life: a documentary about the shooting of Theo Angelopoulos’ O Thiasos / The Travelling Players (1975).

A magistrate reconstructs the murder of Costas Ghoussis, a labourer who was killed by his wife and her lover.

Theo Angelopoulos: A Lifework in Film