Angelopoulos’ first completed film, begun in 1966 and completed in the wake of the 1967 coup that established a military dictatorship in Greece, The Broadcast is a subtly absurdist and deadpan satire about a group of television journalists who conduct a poll to determine the attributes of “the ideal man” and then try to find someone to match those characteristics. At a time when many of the filmmakers of the Greek New Wave, who had made their first features in the early and mid-1960s, were fleeing government crackdown, Angelopoulos managed to sneak this slyly and gently subversive film past the censors. Angelopoulos would come to regard The Broadcast as an experimental homage to the “free cinema” of the period.

As part of a television series devoted to Europe’s major cities, Angelopoulos was commissioned to make this film about Athens. Although much of Angelopoulos’ cinema is set among the villages of the northern countryside, he was born and raised in the city, so this film finds the director musing on an Athenian past that is variously ancient, national and personal, as well as clips from the “history” films The Travelling Players, The Hunters and Alexander the Great.