Lettre à Théo

The Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos died in January 2012 while shooting his last film. In Letter to Theo, Élodie Lélu, a close collaborator and friend of Angelopoulos, remembers his work, interweaving the Greece that the 76-year-old man knew at the time of his death with present-day Greece. Lélu’s film tells of both crises, the “Greek crisis” and the “refugee crisis”, interlacing them and letting Angelopoulos, that “filmmaker of migration”, speak, without abusing his words for her own visual piece.
Her thoughts rise and fall like waves, excerpts from the Greek director’s films are mixed with documentary footage by the Frenchwoman Lélu, who recognises strong reflections of Angelopoulos’s visions in the here and now. She says the director was a victim of the crisis – a melancholiac disappointed by the world. But in this renewed world of all things, where a multinational football team practices right next to the headquarters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, Lélu believes she recognises elements that might have made the much-admired artist believe in politics again. (Carolin Weidner)