Monday | July 18, 2016 7:00 pm

The Weeping Meadow
(To livadi pou dakryzei)

Screening on Film

Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
With Alexandra Aidini, Nikos Poursanidis, Giorgos Armenis.
Greece, 2004, 35mm, color, 163 min.
Greek with English subtitles.
Print source: Museum of the Moving Image

A painstaking reconstruction of something impermanent, the post-World War I refugee village assembled in The Weeping Meadow was built by Angelopoulos to be lost in a flood. The first in his last, incomplete trilogy on Greek history, this film takes place in 1919, after the newly formed Soviet Union has exiled Greeks from Odessa. A stately formalism overtakes Angelopoulos’ style in his penultimate anti-epic, with every other scene a major pictorial triumph of staging, camera movement and photography. The Weeping Meadow is his 1900 or Once Upon a Time in America—without heroics, without the hope of trade unionism or America, which exist here as ideals and dreams in the process of being crushed by world war.