The Dust of Time

2008 Director Theodoros Angelopoulos

This is a film which demands full viewer commitment. Spanning more than half a century and taking place across three continents, this sequel to the monumental Weeping Meadow is a larger-than-life love story, a saga of displaced people constantly on the road, always looking for a home they ultimately only find within the journey itself.

A director is struggling to complete shooting on his latest project, a sweeping historical story being shot in Berlin that tells the true story of his parent's relationship. Spyros  and Eleni  first met and fell in love shortly before World War II broke out, but the two were separated during the fighting, with Spyros making his way to America and settling in New York, while civil war forced Eleni to seek exile in Russia. Stalin established a colony for Greek expatriates in Tashkent, where Eleni joined her fellow expatriates, and when Spyros learned of her whereabouts after Stalin's passing, he left New York to be with her, entering Tashkent illegally via Germany. However, after a brief reunion which led to Eleni becoming pregnant, Spyros was found out by the authorities. After Spyros was arrested, Eleni was sent to Siberia, where she met Jacob, a German Jew. Jacob fell in love with Eleni and he stayed by her side as she wrestled with he memory of Spyros and her son, who with Jacob's help was smuggled out of Tashkent to Canada and eventually reunited with his father. It's not until years later that the director is finally reunited with his parents in Berlin as he tries to put their story on film, but what should be a happy time becomes potentially tragic as the director's daughter falls into a deep depression and threatens to take her life.

This film is very ponderous and convoluted and requires the viewer to expend a great deal of attention to avoid losing the plot. It benefits by a second viewing.

The Beekeeper

1986 Director Theo Angelopoulos

A ponderously paced but poignant story about an ageing beekeeper, who follows the pollen trail around a drearily grey Greece that is far from the picture-postcard vision usually seen on screen.

The film starts with  the marriage of a peasant girl to a military man. Spyro, the father, is at odds with his family for reasons that are never explained. With the departure of his girl, the family fragments and he leaves with his bees to a series of pollen areas in Greece. This is part of an annual migration of Beekeepers, although their numbers are dwindling. Along the way a dysfunctional girl foist herself on his good nature, which becomes increasingly tried. Eventually a bond forms that can only lead to one outcome.

This film is about the bleakness of despair in a hopeless world where all options have long since passed. Theo Angelopoulos' camera work is exemplary and his composition work would develop itself to perfection in the Trilogy series. Although transitions were at times a little jarring this shows a visionary director honing his skills. The film is slow with long static and tracking shots. It employs quite a bit of "action out of frame" to give the viewer a voyeuristic impression. One to watch when in a sombre reflective mood.

Dogtooth

2009 Director Giorgos Lanthimos

This is a brave and bizarre film by writer and director Lanthimos dealing with the perils of social isolation. It is a very clever allegory of the overbearing "Nanny State" that favours fear and violence as a means to control its populace.

A father and mother live in a large house on the outskirts of town with their three children, whose ages range from mid-teens to early twenties. The children have never been allowed to leave the house, which is surrounded by a tall fence, and their knowledge of the outside world has been strictly controlled by their parents, who have chosen to teach them only what they believe is important and have deliberately confused or misled them in many other areas. The parents quite literally treat their children like animals, and the only contact the youngsters have with people outside their family is a woman who works with the father's business and comes by periodically to have sex with the eldest son. She makes the mistake of bringing a present for the two younger daughters, and explains the custom is that they should give her something in return. This simple act sets off a chain reaction of events that has terrible consequences for everyone involved.

This film is both disturbing and intriguing in equal measures. The mother's complicity in the father's paranoid delusions seems ambiguous at times and the cinematography lacks fluidity in places. There is an amount of explicit sexual content which some may find uncomfortable. A particularly unique scene to watch out for is the one where the parents converse silently by mouthing the words so as to prevent their offspring from overhearing. I think this will become a cult classic for all its little failings.

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

2004 Director Theo Angelopoulos

With The Weeping Meadow, one of filmmaking's greatest remaining masters embarks on his crowning achievement: a projected trilogy whose goal is nothing less than "a poetic summing up of the century that just ended."

This first film, spanning 1919-1949, begins with refugees from Odessa settling on a piece of land that was promised to them on Greece's misty northern plains. In a transgression of mythic proportions, the foundling Eleni falls in love with her adoptive brother Alexis and, after marrying his widowed father, flees with her lover to the nearby port of Thessaloniki. As the unrest of the 1930s pits fascism against leftism, Alexis, a talented musician, departs for America and leaves Eleni behind to bear the brunt of Greek history: war, political repression, civil war.

The ambition of Angelopoulos's concept is matched by the grandeur of his style, which takes his majestically fluid camerawork to new heights of virtuosity and produces a steady stream of stunning images. More boldly than ever, Angelopoulos juggles foreground and background, personal and political, story and history into a vision that is simultaneously tragic and epic, capped by a powerful allegorical vision of a "weeping meadow" that feeds the river of history with the tears of individual griefs.