Off Screen

A masterpiece of European cinema that follows two Greek siblings, Voula (eleven) and Alexandros (five), on a train journey in search of a father they have never met. The film is a journey in which the children confront the reality of the world: adult hostility, human fragility, glimpses of solidarity and the lack of what they need, revealing to us the silence of God. Every image in the film is wrapped in Angelopoulos's stylistic atmosphere of grey tones, cold settings and decaying places in Greece, an image far removed from the tourist version of the country we are sold. This is cinema of borders and migration, brimming with the long, unhurried sequence shots characteristic of his style.

Angelopoulos is a director whose cinema gives priority to the poetic, the beautiful, the theatrical and the philosophical. He knows how to find exactly the right words, the ones that tear you apart inside. Landscape in the Mist is the last film in the Greek filmmaker's so-called trilogy of silence, in which he sets out to portray the silence of God. In the first feature, Voyage to Cythera (1984), he captures the silence of history, and in the second, The Beekeeper (1986), the silence of love. There is no need to watch the trilogy in any particular order.