GHOSTS: THE INVISIBLE WORLD OF GREEK CINEMA

The film attempts to revive the epic film hero of American Westerns and cops and robbers b-movies. But whereas in the aforementioned genres the hero, a loner, searches for the criminal guided by his instinct and flying in the face of convention, in The Colors of the Iris, it is himself the hero is trying to find with equal determination. On another level, while fascinated by the cinema, the film tries to shake of this fascination and shed doubt on the authenticity of the spectacle by poking fun at the very concept of representation.

Leon and Zacharoula are spending their twentieth summer holiday at the Kaiafas spa. This year they are without their daughter who is on her honeymoon in Rhodes. The two of them are alone again, just like old times. They get together with friends and go through the usual routine. For the first time, Leon begins to see his life clearly. He has just retired, and he can see the terrible future in store for him. An elderly friend is slowly dying and Leon can see his own end rapidly approaching. In a fit of madness, he kills Zacharoula. Throughout the small spa community, sleeping passions awaken; the fear of death begins to be felt by everyone...

An evil force awakens in downtown Athens, transforming its unsuspecting citizens into raving zombies. The few survivors will have to fight for their lives. To the death...

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, a party of hunters – out in an area close by the Lake of Ioannina – find the body of a Greek Civil War partisan in the snow. They end up carrying the dead man’s body back to their hotel and, there, find themselves held to account by the courthouse of history. If anyone was qualified to talk about the ghosts of history, politics, and ideology, of revolution and of dreams betrayed, it was Theo Angelopoulos. In The Hunters, one of the most iconic works in his oeuvre, he sets all these ghosts up against one another, and in doing so makes clear that the figure best placed to give an account of their clashes – due to its very nature – is yet another ghost: that of cinema. Perhaps because at the heart of history, politics, and ideology, of revolution and of dreams primarily lie images – images that haunt, enchant, overpower, inspire, and spur on. And with such stuff, the world of cinema is made.

An elderly man is riding in a taxi driven by a young man. In the trunk there is a coffin. As night falls, the taxi comes to a quarry. The older man lures the cab driver to a shack, where he introduces him to Karkalou, a woman who has seen better days. They dance to the rhythm of a Louis Armstrong song and then they leave on a little boat, to go on a trip into the world of memories. The travelers’ destination is, once again, the quarry. There, grown men break rocks, revolutionaries conspire to revolt, and the young taxi driver, transformed into the alter ego of his elderly guide, becomes entangled with the woman. At first they quarrel, but then their quarrel ends in a sexual embrace.

Iasonas meets Penelope at a dinner with mutual friends at his home. They go out, they get to know each other, and at some point Penelope moves in. He can share everything with her. Even that childhood game of trying to control his dreams. Until one morning, when Iasonas wakes up to find that Penelope has disappeared. He can’t remember what has happened. Are his chronic headaches to blame, or a secret that reaches out from the past and pulls him further and further away from reality? Iasonas has to find a way to get his memory and his life back. But something keeps getting in the way. Is it the childhood game that has returned? Is it some sort of psychological disorder that threatens him? Or perhaps an inexplicable natural phenomenon, a time warp that pulls him in, deeper and deeper?
Film trailer: Quick Time / Windows Media Player

An English singer wanders around the Greek countryside with his guitar. He comes across a strange, anthropomorphic creature –a Foxman– and together they continue to search for a figure whose existence disappears at the outer limits of myth: Danilo Treles; a famous musician from Andalusia of whom nothing else is known. Along the way, they will meet various strange creatures: an anthropomorphic crow/bait, a witch that lives by sucking the sap from the trees, a biologist that speaks Latin, a black musician warlock.

During the dictatorship, a young man goes to Paris, where he seeks help from a solitary and almost misanthropic distant relative who works as a furrier.The young man carries with him the photograph of a singer whom he presents as his sister, thus causing a series of misunderstandings which trap him in a vicious circle of lies and fantasies.An allegory in the form of a modern-day tragedy of the "misunderstandings" and deceits of modern Greek history, as seen through the eyes of a Greek of the Diaspora.