The Weeping Meadow (To livadi pou dakryzei)

Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. 2004, 163 min. 35mm. With Alexandra Aidini, Nikos Poursanidis, Giorgos Armenis. A painstaking reconstruction of something impermanent, the post-World War I refugee village assembled in The Weeping Meadow was built by Angelopoulos to be lost in a flood. The first in his incomplete trilogy on Greek history, this film takes place in 1919, after the newly formed Soviet Union has exiled Greeks from Odessa. A stately formalism marks Angelopoulos’s penultimate anti-epic, with every other scene a major pictorial triumph of staging, camera movement, and photography. The Weeping Meadow is his 1900 o Once Upon a Time in America—without heroics, without the hope of trade unionism or America, which exist here as ideals and dreams in the process of being crushed by world war.