The Hunters(Oi kynigoi)
Dir: Theo Angelopoulos
Greece, 1977, Greek, 149mins, DCP, Category III
Cast: Vangelis Kazan, Betty Valassi, Giorgos Danis
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1976. A group of bourgeois hunters preparing for a party comes upon the frozen remains of a partisan killed during the Greek civil war. The time for celebration is unexpectedly turned into an inquest into their troubling past, as the colonel, the industrialist, Nazi collaborators and royalist alike are forced to give an account of their unflattering actions. Merging poetic allegory and historic reconstruction in Brechtian dramaturgy, the film underlines a collective nightmare of guilty conscience, and an indictment of the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful history.
Cannes Film Festival: In Competition