1998/132mins/color/35mm

A Merchant Ivory Films Release in Association with Artistic License Films

Distribution Contact:

Artistic License Films

250 West 57th Street, Suite 606

New York, NY 10107

212.265.9124 Fax 212.262.9299

Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer who is terminally ill, as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Along the way, he meets an Albanian immigrant boy threatened by a child-smuggling ring. Alexandre resolves to spend his remaining days taking the boy safely home. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Director Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay Theo Angelopoulos

In collaboration Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris

Executive Producer Phoebe Economopoulos

Cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos

Editor Yannis Tsitsopoulos

Sound Nikos Papadimitriou

Music Eleni Karaindrou

Costumes Giorgos Patsas

Sets Giorgos Ziakas, Costas Dimitriadis

Bruno Ganz Alexandre

Fabrizio Bentivoglio The Poet

Isabelle Renauld Anna

Achilleas Skevis The Boy

Alexandra Ladikou Anna's Mother

Despina Bebedeli Alexandre's Mother

Eleni Gerassimidou Urania

Iris Hatziantoniou Alexander's daughter

Nikos Kouros Anna's Uncle

Alekos Oudinotis Anna's Father

Nikos Kolovos The Doctor

Production Theo Angelopoulos

Greek Film Center

In association with Canal +, Classic SRL, ISTITUTO LUCE, WDR & ARTE

Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1936. He studied law at the University of Athens and film at the IDHEC in Paris. He worked as a film critic between 1964 and 1967 and turned to directing with the film Forminx Story (1965) which was never finished and the short film Broadcast (1968). These were followed by feature films which took part in international festivals, won numerous awards and established his reputation.

Filmography

1970 Reconstruction

1972 Days of 36

1975 The Traveling Players

1977 The Hunters

1980 Megalexandros

1984 Voyage To Cythera

1986 The Bee-Keeper

1988 Landscape In The Mist

1991 The Suspended Step Of The Stork

1995 Ulysses' Gaze

1997-1998 Eternity And A Day

Anyone who says that the idea (for a film) came to him while looking at a tree is both telling the truth and lying.

It is true to the extent that while out walking he stopped to look at the tree, for no particular reason, and without anything appearing to suggest anything. Neither the shape of the tree nor the color nor the old scar in the trunk seemed to lead to an idea.

It is a lie to the extent that the moment when he stopped to look at the tree, through underground workings of his mind that had been going on for days, months and years, a process that was secretly taking place inside him, a few words overheard quite by chance on the street long ago or which he read in a book, an insignificant news item in the papers, an image lying in a stupor or asleep in the back of the storehouse of images we each possess, was suddenly dredged up, transformed at that specific moment. So the moment became quite unexpectedly a privileged meeting with the unsaid.

The tree had played no part. It was innocent.

In this sense, somewhere between truth and lies, I could say that the idea for the wedding scene down by the river in "The Suspended Step of the Stork" was born on a bus taking me from Broadway to the Bronx, at the precise moment when we were going through Harlem in that strange spring of '89.

And yet what was dredged up transformed and almost unrecognizable from oblivion and repetition? And why?

Perhaps something I read in a newspaper in '58.

I might have read a story about the burial of a shepherd on a small island, a few dozen meters away from the shores of Crete, behind the island, towards the Libyan sea. Winter, stormy seas, a boat unable to cross and a dead shepherd waiting to be buried.

Using signals the priest of the nearest village on Crete is notified. He comes, climbs up on a rock with his cassock blowing in the wind, shouts out the funeral mass over the sea and the shepherds on the small island opposite bury the dead man.

But was that it? Or was it something else?

What train of thought was I noiselessly but determinedly following to its logical conclusion at that moment so as to interrupt what I was seeing through the window of the bus (Harlem, in the afternoon sun, both magical and terrible at the same time) and to interject (the way another channel suddenly interposes itself on television through some shift in the signal) the imaginary image of a river-border between two countries, with the white figure of the bride on the one bank and the bridegroom on the other?

The period preceding the writing of a script is a dank period, with strange intermittent, apparently unjustifiable spells of acquired sensitivity. Alternations of absent mindedness and readiness. It is a period where you lead a double life. The noisy part of yourself goes on with your everyday life as always, while the noiseless secretly uses invisible materials to weave that which when it matures at some point, will rise to the surface, in the twinkling of an eye, traversing with incredible ease all the filters of everyday life.

Anyone who says that the idea for a film came to him as he was looking at a tree is telling the truth.

Whatever I have done, whatever has come out into the light, is me. This is what counts, independently of recognition, awards, honors... I don't make films to please anyone... For people like me, films are simply a way of life. When I talk about my life, I have to talk about my life 'in films.' That is, filmmaking is my second life, a parallel life. I like Faulkner's words that the world was created to become a novel. So in my case, I like to believe the world was created to become a film...

My work is divided into three periods, one period of historical, political films which coincides with a more general ideological turmoil in western Europe, a second period where history and politics are not in the forefront but become the background or as the French call it the "toile de fond" or canvas and where these films focus more on the characters and a third period which could be named more existential, more centered on human fate where the themes of borders, external and internal, exile, eternal and internal, the quest for a lost center recur like pieces of a long, great and painful elegy. I continue to be an extremely, or at least so I think, sensitive receiver of the things that happen in Greece and the world.