The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Angelopoulos’s first feature remains one of his finest films, and surely counts as one of the most remarkable debuts ever made … Sheer brilliance.”

Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Theo Angelopoulos, one of Greece’s most acclaimed auteurs, with one of European cinema’s most distinctive signatures, catapulted onto the world stage with this award-winning mystery set in a remote mountain village in Epirus. With the help of her lover, a woman murders her husband, recently returned from Germany where he had gone to work. The crime is never shown on screen. The main characters—judge, policemen, journalists—try to reconstruct and understand the events. Reconstruction was described at the time by film critic Vassilis Rafailidis as the first ​“grown-up” film of Greek cinema. It has been consistently singled out as one of the most important Greek films of all time. Winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Cinematography at the Thessaloniki Festival of Greek Cinema in 1970.

In Greek with English subtitles

“[A] remarkably assured monochrome debut … One could see [this] rural policier as the mirror opposite to a film like Elia Kazan’s melodramatic emigration saga America America.”

David Jenkins, Sight and Sound