Takis Kanellopoulos
Directing
Biography
Takis Kanellopoulos (October 26, 1933 - September 21, 1990) was a Greek director and screenwriter. He was born on October 26, 1933 in Thessaloniki and died on September 21, 1990 from a myocardial infarction. One of the first Greek directors who made films in Thessaloniki, which he never left. He was honored at the 7th Thessaloniki Film Festival, in 1966, on the occasion of the film "Excursion", for his contribution to raising the quality level of the Festival. In the corresponding event of 1968 and on the occasion of the film "Parenthesis" he was awarded by the Hellenic Film Critics Association for his direction, while the film itself was recognized as the Best Artistic Film of the year together with "Girls in the Sun" by Vassilis Georgiadis. During the 1970s, the director's films were negatively received by the Thessaloniki festival audience and ignored by the critics of the time. From then until the next decade, Kanellopoulos dabbled in literature, writing poems and short stories. The death of Takis Kanellopoulos coincided with the long-awaited approval of financing for a film of his that would never be made.
Known For
1941 and the war culminates. The wife of a lieutenant and a sergeant fall madly in love. Times and circumstances -military service, marriage, friendship between the two men- forbid this love, but do not negate it. When the lieutenant is injured and taken to hospital, the two lovers, against all odds, dare the only possible way out: he defects, she leaves her husband, and they begin a journey without return towards the border.
Excursion
Two strangers, a man and a woman, meet during a brief interlude in their journeys, discovering a connection that exists only within the hours of a train delay.
Interlude
Three stories dealing with three men and their stance towards life, given their personal background. All stories are held in Northern Greece (Macedonia and Thrace), covering all the spectrum from urban to rural settings.
It's a Long Road
During the cold spring of 1941, with Greece already under German occupation, a long-suffering squad of war-battered soldiers receives orders from the headquarters in Athens to fall back, leaving behind the Albanian Front. As the men retreat through the snow-covered landscapes of the bomb-scarred Greek countryside, the terrifying certainty that nothing will ever be the same again crushes their weary human souls.
Sky
The brief love story that Sonia lived in the summer with her teacher, an older man and married in the 60's. For the autumn, Tonio travels with his family abroad, leaving Sonia with his most intimate memories. Sonia has lived in Florence, Paris and has acquired the romanticism of the interwar years she has found in books, paintings and music of the time. He has chosen to live a life apart, of introspection, away from the crowds, but always in a sensational mood.
Sonia
Three men renegotiate such concepts as desertion, humanism, and freedom.
The Last Spring
The third part of the informal “excursion” to Macedonia – that began with Macedonian Wedding (1960) and continued with Thasos (1961) – Kastoria, with its foreign traveler on horseback seeking a fairy in the modern but rather timeless everyday life of the Macedonian city, closes a perfect cycle of uncompromising documentation right as the curtain rings down on the 1960s. Takis Kanellopoulos has now definitively exchanged history for myth (and its representation), and here he uses it as a bridge between past and present, finally mythologizing a city which, through his gaze, regains anew the characteristics of a rare Greekness, carved from Byzantine ghosts, ancient Greek outbursts, materials of soil and water that are stateless yet deeply rooted in a Greece that remains to be discovered.
Kastoria
In Thasos, by the humble means of a limpid and poetic observational gaze, slivers of an island life routine are made into a proposal countering the picture-postcard image of an entire country, at precisely the time when Greece was experiencing its first explosive wave of tourism back in the 1960s. Rhythmic, at times frenzied and bordering on paganistic, structured around traditional folk songs of the Greek islands, with an emphasis on seeking out a sense of familiarity with the “feel” of the island, and with humankind and the natural world set at its heart.
Thasos
This film narrates six different stories in a very lyrical way: a coachman wanders around town; two elderly people go to the park every Sunday; a man leaves flowers in various neighbourhoods in memory of a friend who was killed during the war; a boy narrates how they celebrated his father’s name-day; a member of the resistance lives his last moments; a woman keeps waiting for a letter which never arrives. (Greek Film Archive)
Memories of a Sunday
A Greek documentary by Takis Kanellopoulos about wedding traditions in western Greece and Macedonia. It was filmed in the village of Velvendo.
Macedonian Wedding
The story of four fellow students who fall in love with the same girl.