Theo Angelopoulos, Emerging Humanitarian Crises and the Healing Power of Archival Footage in Restoring Personal and National Identities

Letter to Theo (Lettre A Théo, 2019), Chèche Lavi (2019) and Pirotecnia (2019) are documentaries focusing on forgotten stories and people, playing with archival footage of the past and reconstructing Angelopoulos’ never completed film, which is given a wholly new perspective by the turbulent reality of contemporary time. With them, the 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam hit the heart of the current cultural and geopolitical crisis, filled with national wounds, migrations and humanitarian crises, which sink into oblivion on a daily basis due to the general flood of global catastrophes, wars and the ever-growing trends of post-truths. The silence of the speechless, the unheard and the silenced thus emerges as the main thread of the films, which cut deep into the national wounds of the Colombian, Haitian and Greek peoples and the Middle Eastern refugees indefinitely stuck in the impoverished Greece.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!