Angelopoulos muses on the eve of the millennium

By Preston Wilder

THEODOROS Angelopoulos, one of the few internationally-known Greek film directors, was in Cyprus yesterday – a week before his latest movie, Eternity and a Day, which opens here on March 26.

Speaking at a press conference at the Pantheon Cinema in Nicosia (where the film will be showing), Angelopoulos justified his reputation as a highly intellectual film-maker, quoting from Malraux and Talleyrand, and discoursing eloquently on the current film scene, recent political developments and the state of the world in general.

“It’s as though we’re all in a giant waiting-room, waiting for a door to open,” he said, referring to the general atmosphere of uncertainty at the millennium’s end. No-one really knows where the world is headed, he observed; political labels have ceased to mean anything, and a new generation has lost interest in politics altogether.

European cinema, similarly, has lost touch with its audience and been superseded by “an American monologue”, unable to connect with audiences reared on soaps and television serials.

The whole thing, he said, borrowing the title of one of his best-known films, is a “landscape in the mist”.

Angelopoulos’ films are known for their complex meanings and slow, meditative pace. Eternity and a Day is the story of a dying man looking back on his life – melancholy at first, but gradually finding hope in his friendship with a young Albanian orphan. The director called it “the most fragile film I have ever made”.

The film won the Golden Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.