Macedonian Wedding

Μακεδονικός γάμος

“For unto us a director is born” raved the Greek press after Macedonian Wedding first screened in 1960. And rightly so, for this short documentary that anointed the 27-year-old Takis Kanellopoulos as Greek cinema’s new hope overnight is a visual poem of rare sensitivity. What starts as a documentation of joyous wedding rites in an eastern Macedonian village (Velventos in Kozani) is transmuted through the director’s gaze into an elegy on the parting of ways – as if Persephone is to descend into Hades – and the chthonic, paganistic bite of the natural world. The germ of Kanellopoulos’ later work is already apparent here: the low-key tone, the lyricism, the Macedonian landscape, the charge borne by what is borderline, and the female face that so captivated him. Macedonian Wedding won Best Short Film at the First Week of Greek Cinema, and First Prize at the Belgrade Film Festival (1961).
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.
Direction: Takis Kanellopoulos
Script: Takis Kanellopoulos
Cinematography: Iakovos Pairidis
Producers: Panagiotis Ηaratsaris
Format: DCP
Color: B/W
Production Country: Greece
Production Year: 1961
Duration: 23'
Contact: Papandreou S.A. (Dimitris Merziotis, dmerziotis@pap.gr)

Takis Kanellopoulos

Filmography

1960 Macedonian Wedding (short)
1961 Thassos (short)
1962 Glory Sky (fiction)
1966 Excursion (fiction)
1968 Interlude (fiction)
1969 Kastoria (short)
1972 The Last Spring (fiction)
1975 Memories of a Sunday (fiction)
1978 Romantic Note (fiction)
1980 Sonia (fiction)