Cinematheque Ontario Presents:
Quiet Days, Crystal Nights
Recent Films from Greece
October 25 - November 9, 1996
Toronto, Canada

Continuing its tradition of presenting a semi-annual showcase of Greek cinema, Cinematheque Ontario offers recent critical and box office hits from Greece, plus an important retrospective of the films of Pantelis Voulgaris, whom critics rank with Theo Angelopoulos as one of the country's greatest directors.

The Greek Village Online proudly presents an interview with Pantelis Voulgaris, Antonis Kokkinos and Elli Petridi

This series has been made possible by the assistance of the Consulate-General of Greece, Toronto, and by the participation of the Greek Film Centre, Athens.

Below is the list of Greek films to be shown. All screening are in original language with English subtitles unless otherwise indicated. You can click on the title for the film description, dates & showing times. Please note that the programme is subject to change, but we will do our best to keep it up-to-date.

METECHMIO (BORDERLINE)
Director: Panos Karkanevatos, Greece 1995, 81 minutes
Cast: Aris Lebessopoulos, Christos Kalavrouzos

Widely acclaimed as one of the best films to emerge from Greece in many years, BORDERLINE has played to critical raves at several international festivals. Part political statement, part meta-physical mystery, BORDERLINE centres on two brothers, Stelios and Yannis. The impulsive Stelios skips their small town, deserts from the army, and is thought dead, until Yannis, now a city cop, recognizes his name on the papers of an illegal immigrant seaman. He begins a search for his lost brother, a search that takes him across many borders: between past and present, between Greece and its neighbouring countries, between one identity and another. Spare, meditative, beautifully composed, BORDERLINE is a real find.
Friday, October 25
6:30 p.m.


TO VLEMMA TOU ODYSSEA (ULYSSES' GAZE)

 Director: Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy 1995, 177 minutes Cast: Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern

An epic meditation on the history of cinema, and of 20th-century Europe, most particularly of the Balkans, ULYSSES' GAZE is a rare achievement in contemporary cinema: it is a film whose ideas are as profound as its images are indelible. Harvey Keitel plays a Greek-American filmmaker who returns to Athens after 35 years in search of three missing reels of film shot at the turn of the century by the legendary Manakis brothers. His "odyssey" takes him across the Balkans to war-torn Sarajevo, where the film reaches a distressing (but beautiful) conclusion in another of Angelopoulos' "landscapes in the mist." Maia Morgenstern plays the three women the filmmaker encounters in his travels. Among the many memorable sequences, all shot with wintry elegance by Yorgos Arvinitis, is one that will stand in the Angelopoulos pantheon: a magical long take of a family party, in which several years exist simultaneously. Time Magazine chose ULYSSES' GAZE as one of the two best films of 1995.
Friday, October 25
8:15 p.m.


PARAKALO YINEKES MIN KLETE (PLEASE LADIES, DON'T CRY)
Directors: Stavros Tsiolis, Christos Vakalopoulos, Greece 1993, 89 minutes Cast: Argiris Bakirtzis, Dimitris Vlachos

Our last Greek festival introduced Toronto audiences to director Stavros Tsiolis, with a screening of his marvelous INVINCIBLE LOVERS. Tsiolis reveals the same talent for delicate observation in PLEASE LADIES, a bucolic comedy about two icon restorers who are too preoccupied with the pleasures of life and amateur astronomy to finish the job they've been hired to do. They travel from Athens to a mountain village to restore the 15th-century frescoes in its Byzantine chapel. Deterred by small adventures and escapades, including those of the heart, the two men never seem to get beyond meditating on the beauty of art.... Affectionate, leisurely, lovingly shot and scored, PLEASE LADIES seems to suspend time, as the two restorers settle into a job that seems to them more like a vacation.
Saturday, October 26
6:30 p.m.


ELEFTERIOS VENIZELOS
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1980, 157 minutes
Cast: Minas Christidis, Yannis Voglis

An historical epic about one of the most important figures in 20th-century Greek history, this sweeping film has the characteristic Voulgaris touch: instead of bombast and rhetoric, he provides precision, simplicity, understatement and clarity. The film chronicles the crucial period between 1909 and 1920, when Elefterios Venizelos was invited to Athens by the Military League, sought "national redemption" by enriching the country's economic and cultural life and by expanding its borders, and then watched as all his work was destroyed by political corruption and foreign intervention. The film was shot by Giorgos Arvanitis, the masterful cinematographer of Angelopoulos' cinema. "A major production achievement by Greek standards, a reconstruction of an era with superb artistic and technical work" (Yannis Bacoyannopoulos).
Saturday, October 26
8:15 p.m.


LEFTERIS DIMAKOPOULOS (LEFTERIS)
Director: Pericles Hoursoglou, Greece 1994, 105 minutes
Cast: Nikos Georgakis, Maria Skoula

A major box office and critical hit in Greece, LEFTERIS obviously touched a chord in local audiences with its story of an ambitious man who sacrifices family and friends in his drive for success. The film opens on New Year's Eve 1987 at a party given by affluent engineer Lefteris Dimakopoulos. The arrival of an unexpected visitor, a friend from his student days, sends Lefteris' memories (and the film) back to 1973, as the determined Lefteris fights with his family over his live-in relationship with Dimitra, the young woman who loves him. As he becomes more successful, Lefteris ignores the self-sacrificing Dimitra, and ultimately abandons her for his studies in Germany. More than a decade later, having risen to the top of his profession, Lefteris is confronted with the cost of his success. "The familiar situation is given freshness here thanks to Hoursoglou's sensitive direction and the natural performances of the cast of newcomers" (Variety).
Monday, October 28
6:30 p.m.


KRISTALLINES NICHTES (CRYSTAL NIGHTS)
Director: Tonia Marketaki, Greece/France/Switzerland 1991, 138 minutes Cast: François Delaive, Tania Tripi

Variety has called director Tonia Marketaki "one of the most interesting women working in cinema today." A potent combination of eroticism, mysticism and history, CRYSTAL NIGHTS features a cast of characters who, Marketaki says, "go to any lengths in their quest for passion." A mystic tells a young German girl, Isabella, that her ideal lover will be born the day she marries. Years later, in 1938, she encounters a Jewish teenager, and, though married to a military officer, falls deeply in love with the young man. When he marries another, she commits suicide, and is reborn as the girl Anna, who comes to the rescue of an older Albert, who faces death at the hands of the Nazis. As the controversial pun in the title signals, CRYSTAL NIGHTS uses history for its own purposes, examining anti-Semitism in Greece and the fate of the country during World War II as part of its heady brew of sorcery, sex, and reincarnation.
Monday, October 28
8:45 p.m.


TO PROXENIO TIS ANNAS (THE ENGAGEMENT OF ANNA)
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1972, 82 minutes
Cast: Anna Vayena, Smaro Veaki

A classic of world cinema, recently chosen as one of the ten best Greek films of the last 30 years by International Film Guide, Voulgaris' feature debut swept all of the Greek film prizes, won several awards abroad, and was hailed as "one of the most sensitive, human and impressive Greek films ever made" (Variety). Establishing the quiet but charged tone of his subsequent cinema, Voulgaris sets the film in the sunny garden of a middle-class Greek household as relatives and friends come by to celebrate the engagement of Anna the maid. As the day wears on, the family realizes that they cannot afford to lose the services of this faithful "girl from the village," and decide to stop her marriage. "***1/2" (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune). "Marvelous" (Georgia Brown, The Village Voice).

preceeded by
O KLEFTIS (THE THIEF)
Director: Penniless Voulgaris, Greece 1966, 18 minutes
Cast: Alexis Damianos, Pantelis Voulgaris

Voulgaris' debut is a funny, ironic story about a gullible cop and a wily pickpocket.

&
TZIMIS O TIGRIS (JIMMY THE TIGER)
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1966, 14 minutes
Cast: Syros Kalogirou, Marilyse Preisler

Voulgaris' second film was central to the birth of the New Greek Cinema. Drawing on Italian neorealism, it tells the story of a circus strongman who is seduced by a German tourist and must pay the consequences for the one night stand.
Wednesday, October 30
6:30 p.m.


TAXIDI STA KITHIRA (VOYAGE TO CYTHERA)
Director: Theo Angelopoulos, Greece 1983, 137 minutes
Cast: Manos Katrakis, Giulio Brogi

Angelopoulos' most underrated film, VOYAGE opens with a sequence that ranks among the director's best, and closes with an image that stands at the heart of his cinema: an old man abandoned on a raft in the morning fog (another of Angelopoulos' mist-enshrouded landscapes, signifying dissolution). Manos Katrakis, Greece's finest contemporary stage actor, plays a Greek revolutionary who returns to his home village from years of exile in the Soviet Union. Having lived in a kind of suspended time, the old man encounters a world in which family and friends want to forget the past and make their way blindly into the future. "A masterful presentation of the two worlds of reality and imagination, serving to confront them, shuffle them, and fuse them together in a dazzling display" (Yvette Biro).
Wednesday, October 30
8:45 p.m.


ACROPOLE
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1995, 130 minutes
Cast: Lefteris Voyatzis, Stavros Paravas

Rollicking fun, Voulgaris' latest hit is a rude, rowdy, "richly textured, often enthralling tribute" (Variety) to the world of the Acropole musical theatre, which dominated the theatre scene in Athens in the Fifties and Sixties with its lavish Hollywood style productions. When Prince, the self-made producer who runs Acropole, fires one of his leading ladies for drunkenness, he turns to Lakis, once a child-prodigy, now a legendary female impersonator (and notorious womanizer) who has retired from the stage to run a casting agency. Lakis decides that a return to Acropole would be just the thing to settle accounts with old rivals, both real and imaginary. Voulgaris, who loves the popular music of his country (see THE GREAT LOVE SONGS, playing on November 6), "allows the plot to be swamped by the musical numbers. . . . These sequences are great fun, and lovers of Greek music and song will have a great time" (David Stratton, Variety).
Director will be present at screening.
Friday, November 1
6:30 p.m.


O MELISSOKOMOS (THE BEEKEEPER)
Director: Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France 1986, 120 minutes
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nadia Mourouzi

Angelopoulos' admiration for Antonioni was never more apparent than in this "haunting, demanding, impressive film" (Variety). Co-scripted by Antonioni's scenarist Toniono Guerra and starring one of the Italian master's favourite actors, THE BEEKEEPER is, in the director's words, "the journey of a beekeeper from North to South, following the trail of the flowers. A films on the silence of history, of love, of God." In one of his greatest performances, Mastroianni plays a schoolteacher and beekeeper who leaves his family on the day his daughter is married to drive across Greece. His encounters with old friends and a young hitch-hiker reflect Angelopoulos' concern with his country's historical amnesia. "Angelopoulos' best of recent years...certainly will find its way on to at least some of 1988's Ten Best lists" (Derek Malcolm, The Guardian).
Friday, November 1
8:45 p.m. &
Wednesday, November 6
8:45 p.m.


AP'TO HIONI (FROM THE SNOW)
Director: Sotiris Goritsas, Greece 1993, 90 minutes
Cast: Gerassimos Skiadaresis, Vassilis Eleftheriadis

Winner of the Best Film, Screenplay, Cinematography and International Critics' prizes at the Thessalonaki Film Festival, and selected for the Cannes Film Festival, FROM THE SNOW tackles a difficult subject and treats it with great intelligence, compassion and complexity. The film follows the odyssey of two young men and a boy who, as the Albanian regime collapses in 1990, make their way first to Corfu and then to Athens. The adversities the three face as they travel across Greece become emblematic of the country's current state: "This is a journey into the heart of Greece," the director has said, "unveiling this country's strengths and weaknesses." As one of the men "from the snow" states towards the end of the film: "In Albania they called us Greeks, in Greece we are Albanians." A film of great consequence.
Saturday, November 2
4:30 p.m.


TELOS EPOCHIS (END OF AN ERA)
Director: Antonis Kokkinos, Greece 1995, 98 minutes
Cast: Demosthenes Papadopoulos, Costas Kazanas

A box office smash in Greece, END OF AN ERA has been dubbed GREEK GRAFFITI by many critics. Set in the watershed year 1969-70, the film focuses on a group of high school seniors as they live through "the end of an era." Christos is the centre of the group, a country boy whose family has moved to Athens so he can attend a good school and go on to medical studies. Christos' knowledge of American and British rock music allows him entry into the circle of glum hunk Giorgos, whose friends include Pericles, who runs a pirate radio station; rebellious Yiannis, whose leftist father opposes the military government; and Nassos, a nerdy James Bond fan. Focusing more on the cultural and political currents of the day than on teenage pranks, the film is dense with period detail, including a score of classic late-Sixties pop and rock. "Nostalgia, romance and rock 'n' roll figure prominently in Antonis Kokkinos' . . . well-crafted period drama. . . . Tech values are superior. All of the 1969-70 sequences are strikingly filmed in high-contrast black-and-white" (Variety).
Director will be present at screening.
Saturday, November 2
6:30 p.m.


PETRINA CHRONIA (STONE YEARS)
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1985, 135 minutes
Cast: Themis Bazaka, Dimitris Katalifos

One of Voulgaris' most moving and critically acclaimed works, STONE YEARS is the true story of a couple separated by prison and exile during the Greek civil war. Voulgaris has said their story represents that of many of his compatriots: "Babis and Eleni, through their personal odyssey, represent the greater segment of the Greek people. This film is a small tribute to all that these simple people lived through from 1954 to 1974. These twenty stone years." Themis Bazaka is astonishing as Eleni, who meets Babis while distributing anti-government leaflets, is jailed, finds herself pregnant, raises her child in prison, and then, when the dictatorship ends, fearfully faces life in the outside with a man she hardly knows. Winner of the Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, STONE YEARS is "quite simply a deeply moving, heartwarming film" (Le Monde).
Saturday, November 2
8:45 p.m.


TOPIO STIN OMICHLI (LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST)
Director: Theo Angelopoulos, Greece 1988, 125 minutes
Cast: Tania Paleoglou, Michalis Zeke

LANDSCAPE has become a contemporary classic, one of the rare films that audiences return to time and again. Winner of the European Film Award for Best Film of the Year, LANDSCAPE also proved to be Angelopoulos' breakthrough in North America, perhaps because it is his most accessible work. Two small children, a brother and sister, abandon their home in Athens and travel north, hoping to find their father in Germany. Theirs becomes a quest into the heart of a country, and a continent, which has lost its historic and cultural moorings. "Belongs to a stately modernist tradition that embraces figures as divergent as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Wim Wenders . . . a work of exceptional beauty . . . There are sights in the film that once seen cannot be forgotten" (Stephen Holden, The New York Times). Movieline Magazine recently chose LANDSCAPE as one of the 100 greatest foreign films of all time, saying, "Angelopoulos' awesome, devastating movie make you hold your breath for fear of missing a frame; this one could change your life."
Sunday, November 3
7:30 p.m.


I FANELLA ME TO NOUMERO 9 (THE STRIKER WITH THE No 9)
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1988, 117 minutes
Cast: Stratos Tzortzoglou, Themis Bazaka

Selected for the Berlin Film Festival's Competition, STRIKER brings forceful insight into a subject that has interested many European directors of late: soccer as both sociological phenomenon and symbol. Vassilis is a young, good-looking soccer player who has adjusted to the rootless life, moving from city to city, woman to woman, hotel room to hotel room. But, just as he reaches his peak at the age of 23, Vassilis discovers that he is not the independent player he has imagined, that he is indeed nothing more than a cog in a corrupt machine, a machine that's willing to destroy him if he makes any trouble. Voulgaris typically avoids the clichés inherent in the story of the rise and fall of a sports star, and focuses instead on the loneliness and bewilderment of the naive Vassilis.
Monday, November 4
6:30 p.m.


PANO KATO KE PLAGIOS (UP, DOWN & SIDEWAYS)
Director: Michael Cacoyannis, Greece 1992, 108 minutes
Cast: Irene Papas, Stratos Tzortzoglou

A majestic Irene Papas takes command of the screen again in this wild, ribald farce, which brought director Michael Cacoyannis (of ZORBA THE GREEK and STELLA fame) out of semi-retirement. Papas is the centrepiece of this fresco of contemporary Athens, as a middle-aged, rich widow who shares her lovely home and a passion for opera with her gay son. When a hunky gym instructor who claims to be Maria Callas' nephew arrives on the scene, followed on his well-oiled heels by a randy sailor and a transvestite, the house bursts "up, down and sideways" with sexual exploits, misunderstandings and disputes. Papas treats the proceedings as if she were being force fed on zabaglione-she grins with the pleasure of being back on screen-and the attractive young men who surround her also exude gaiety.
Monday, November 4
8:45 p.m.


ISICHES MERES TOU AVGOUSTOU
(QUIET DAYS IN AUGUST)
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1991, 108 minutes
Cast: Aleka Paizi, Thanassis Vengos

A prize winner at the Berlin Film Festival, QUIET DAYS is a lovely portrait of the people left behind in mid-August Athens, as its citizens escape to the seaside or mountain villages. As the director says, "only the lonely stay behind and those who love the deserted city." With deftness and compassion, Voulgaris interweaves the portraits of several of these lonely people: an old, reclusive widow, and the young woman next door whom she befriends after years of isolation; a retired seaman whose life changes radically when he aids a woman who has fainted in the subway; and a meek bank employee who receives an erotic phone call every day at four from an unknown woman. "One of Voulgaris' best films . . . a gentle, touching and beautifully made film. Photography is outstanding . . . [and] there's also a beautiful score. . . . A feather in the cap for Greek cinema" (David Stratton, Variety). "Voulgaris emerges with QUIET DAYS more fresh than ever, justifying the privileged position he holds in Greek cinema alongside Theo Angelopoulos" (Alexis Grivas, London Film Festival).
Wednesday, November 6
6:30 p.m.


HAPPY DAY
Director: Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece 1976, 105 minutes
Cast: Georges Sarri, George Moschides

Winner of many prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director and the Critics' Grand Prix at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Voulgaris' masterpiece has a fiercely ironic title. Voulgaris was exiled to an island by the military junta, and he recreates his penal experience in this great, absurdist work. On a wind-swept, sun-scorched, arid island, the control of the authorities over prisoners seems to be total; they even, as one says, "hold sway over dreams." But one prisoner refuses to submit to their brutal regime, and will not sign the "Declaration of Repentance." Trying to maintain calm in preparation for the visit of "The Great Mother," the authorities pretend the recalcitrant prisoner has committed suicide, but he has really escaped, and is hiding out on the island..... Voulgaris' bitterness over his own imprisonment is distilled into formal mastery; he orchestrates HAPPY DAY with masterful precision. "***1/2. Visually dazzling" (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune).
Saturday, November 9
6:30 p.m.


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