Eternity And A Day review

Dying poet Alexander (Bruno Ganz) spends one last day in Thessaloniki settling his affairs before checking in to hospital. He visits his daughter, then rescues a young Albanian refugee (Archileas Skevis) from a gang of adoption traffickers. All the while, Alexander is haunted by dreams of earlier times with his vivacious wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld), and despairs of his unfinished poetic undertakings.

This stately, elusive and elegiac work from veteran Greek director Theo Angelopoulos won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in '98. Filmed in long, fluid takes and slipping between past and present, Eternity And A Day unfolds as a meditation on the internal journeys we all make and on how we can become strangers to ourselves. Ganz contributes a remarkably subtle performance but, above all, it's full of unforgettable images, including a child's funeral, a spectral bus journey and refugees clinging to a fence in a snowy no-man's land.