Introduction

Serge Toubiana and Frédéric Strauss: In most of your films, there seems to be a sense of melancholy for the past. But the two children, who are not subject to this melancholy, are pulling you in a different direction.

Theodoros Angelopoulos: I believe the past is my own personal past dragged into the present by my occupation as a filmmaker. The tree at the end of the film is the tree from Voyage to Cythera, a reference to my own personal film landscape. In the course of this picture, the children cross a film landscape in order to reach, at the end, a different film landscape, which, I believe, should offer them renewed hope. I would like to believe the world will be saved by the cinema. Cinema is my world and it is the scope of all my journeys. I am always searching for secret little utopias that will enchant me; I am doing my best to believe in the relevance of these trips I am constantly embarking on through my films.