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ULYSSES' GAZE
On
the occasion of his return home for a screening, a first-generation Graeco-American
filmmaker known only as 'A' begins the quest of a film historian's lifetime,
searching for vintage reels of film shot by two brothers recording ethnic
conflicts in the Balkans. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. See Jean-Luc
Godard's 'Contempt' for another meditation on 'going home again' and the filmmaker's
art.
Greek filmmaker living in self-imposed exile in the United States rectums to Florina, the city of his birth, for a special screening of one of his most controversial films. But A. is looking for something else: the long-lost reels of the first film ever shot by the Manakias brothers. When cinema was still in its infancy, these cineastes tireless sly traveled the length and breadth of the Balkans with their cameras. Unconcerned about national or ethnic differences, they assembled a testimonial to a region and its cultures. But do these never-developed reels containing the first images ever photographed on film really exist? And if so where are they? Journeying from Koritsa in Albania to Skopje in Macedonia; from Bucarest to Costanza in Romania; along the Danube that leads him into former Yugoslavia to Belgrade and finally to Sarajevo, A. continues his search. Along the way, he encounters facets of his own history, the past of the Balkans and of the women he perhaps might have loved there. A. follows the clues that lead him to the Manakias brothers' lost reels in a forgotten cinematheque. But, having been abandoned by inspiration, his search more than anything represent a hunger for the innocence of the brothers' creative gaze for that original state of purity that might bring him inner peace.
