He was born in Athens in 1935. He began to study Law in Athens, but dropped out of university before his graduation. In 1961 he left for Paris, where he attended courses in French Literature, Filmology, and Ethnology, before going on to study at the IDHEC Film Academy and the Musee de l’homme. He returned to Greece in 1963 and worked as a film critic for four years. In 1968, he presented his first short film, The Broadcast, at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Two years later, his first feature film, Reconstruction, won First Prize at Thessaloniki, as well as several other prizes at international festivals around the world, signalling the dawn of Modern Greek cinema. The distinctive sequence shots in The Travelling Players (1975) established his personal style. His films were screened at various film festivals and garnered numerous nominations and awards, culminating in the Golden Palm at Cannes, in 1998, for Eternity and a Day. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (1995), Nanterre La Defense (2001), Essex University (2001), the University of Western Macedonia (2008), the University of the Aegean (2009) and Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir (2010). He died on January 24th, 2012, following an accident during the shooting of his film The Other Sea.
Filmography
1965 Forminx Story (unfinished)
1968 The Broadcast (short)
1970 Reconstruction
1972 Days of ’36
1975 The Travelling Players
1977 The Hunters
1980 Alexander the Great
1981 One Village, One Villager (ντοκ/doc)
1983 Athens, Return to the Acropolis (ντοκ/doc)
1984 Voyage to Cythera
1986 The Beekeeper
1988 Landscape in the Mist
1991 The Suspended Step of the Stork
1995 Lumiere and Company: Ulysses (segment)
1995 Ulysses’ Gaze
1998 Eternity and a Day
2004 Trilogy Ι:The Weeping Meadow
2007 To Each his Own Cinema: Three Minutes (segment)
2008 The Dust of Time
2012 The Other Sea (ημιτελής/unfinished)