Ulysses' gaze [DVD]

Harvey Keitel is a Greek filmmaker who returns home after thirty-five years in America. He is in search of a lost film directed by the Manakias brothers, a film he believes to be the original “first film ever made”. His journey takes him on a journey through the Balkans, from Greece to Albania, from Bulgaria to Romania, a journey that ends in the besieged city of Sarajevo. On its release, “Ulysses Gaze” was criticised for its supposed ambivalent stance on the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. In hindsight, however, the film is an elegant and haunting eulogy on the death of utopia, and a film which acknowledges a much more complicated history to the Balkans than the one presented in the simplistic and moralistic films emerging from Western Europe. Ambitious and complex, “Ulysse’s Gaze” is also finally moving and heartbreaking; in its retelling of The Odyssey it passionately illuminates all that has been lost in the mad rush to replace culture with consumerism, to replace identity rooted in history with the fiction of perpetual recreation in cyberspace. There are scenes in this movie - the dismantling of Lenin’s statue, the final serenade in the Sarajevo fog - that confirm Angelopoulos as one of the leading film directors in the world today. Cast includes Erland Josephson, Maia Morgenstern and Thanassis Vengos.