Oi kynigoi (1977)

On New Year's Eve, a bourgeoisie group of hunters finds the frozen body of a long dead WWII partisan fighter. They spend the night debating what to do with it, which reveals their sins from the war and leads to their symbolic punishment.

Director:

Theodoros Angelopoulos

Writers:

Theodoros Angelopoulos, Stratis Karras

Stars:

Vangelis Kazan, Eva Kotamanidou, Giorgos Danis

1 nomination.

Cast

Credited cast:
Vangelis Kazan	...	Sawas
Eva Kotamanidou
Giorgos Danis	...	Yannis Diamantis
Mairi Hronopoulou	...	Mrs. Diamantis
Elias Stamatiou	...	Antonis Papadopoulos (as Ilia Stamatiou)
Betty Valassi
Aliki Georgouli	...	Mrs. Papadopoulos
Nikos Kouros	...	The General
Stratos Pahis	...	Giorgos Fantakis
Dimitris Kaberidis
Christoforos Nezer	...	The Politician
Takis Doukakos
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Rafael Denogias
Giorgos Frantzeskakis
Thanos Grammenos

Storyline

It is New Year's Eve. 1976. On a Greek island a party of bourgeois hunters comes upon a body, buried in the snow and miraculously preserved by the cold. By his uniform, he appears to be one of the thousands of partisans killed during the civil war and the hunting party, a group of the ruling elite, must now decide what to do with the body. When they disinter it, blood begins to flow from the wounds in the partisan's body and they carry it back to the lodge where the inquest begins. The film becomes a biting commentary, an extraordinary allegory for the persistence of guilt in which Greece's post-war Right is placed symbolically on trial in a series of tableaux in which the hunters are faced with their re-created sins. Merging poetic metaphor and historic reconstruction each member of the hunting party views the body on the makeshift bier: the colonel and his wife, the businessman, the ex-prefect of police, now a publisher, the ex-partisan who is now a wealthy contractor, the ...

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Plot Keywords:

greek civil war | greek partisan | partisan | dead body | new year's eve | 

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Genres:

Drama

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Details

Official Sites:

Official site

Country:

Greece France

Language:

Greek

Release Date:

19 October 1977 (France)

Also Known As:

The Hunters

Filming Locations:

Ioannina, Greece

Company Credits

Production Co:

Theo Angelopoulos Films,Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

168 min 144 min (DVD)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Part III of "A Trilogy of History" by Theodoros Angelopoulos.

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Connections

Follows Days of 36 (1972)

User Reviews

A great journey, beginning to end!

To start off this review, I should mention that I haven't seen the movie. I don't even speak Greek.

But, I can tell you this: I like to say "o-pa!" often. I say "o-pa!" at least once a century.

True: I haven't seen the movie, but it is probably pretty good, because I think another review I read said that the movie had communists in it? So that's pretty cool.

I do plan on watching the movie later this year, and I will be posting an update to this review then. Thank you.

Post-viewing update: It was a pretty good movie.

Bye.