About

I've been preoccupied with ideas about exile and the journey, both exterior and interior – with the possibility of dreaming in this end-of-the-century world where there's an absence of dreams… For me 'home' is not your house, but a place where you feel in harmony and what counts is not arriving but the journey itself. So in this film, the hero's homecoming is also a departure, the beginning of a new journey.

In Ulysses' Gaze, Harvey Keitel plays an exiled Greek filmmaker who returns to the Balkans following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in search of Greece's earliest known film. He retraces the history of the Manakia brothers, documentarians who moved freely throughout the region in the early 1900s capturing its history and customs. The early filmmakers and missing reels provide an allegorical backdrop for Angelopoulos, whose travelogue extends to the process of personal redemption for our protagonist. As the filmmaker travels throughout Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, he wanders into his own past, and attempts to reconcile his memories and the fraught relationships he encounters.

M | Adult themes, Low level violence