Rent Landscape in the Mist (1988)

A master director at his best - Landscape in the Mist review by CP Customer

This is an elegaic film that stands in its own right, but which is enhanced by an awareness of Angelopoulos's earlier films.

Nearly all of the director's monumental works are beautifully nuanced investigations of Greek history in the 20th century. This historical enquiry is always set within absorbing narratives.

The latter point is never truer than here in 'Landscape in the Mist', where we follow two children on an emotionally scouring quest to find their father.

The cinematography is brilliant, and is at least as full of memorable scenes as the earlier works.

Made in 1988, 'Landscape in the Mist' also throws a beam forwards in time to anticipate the desperate struggles of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe in the 21st century.

The Myth, the Mist, and the Motorbike - Landscape in the Mist review by griggs

Two children leave Athens to search for the father they’ve never met, said to be in Germany. That’s the hook of Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist, but for film is really about how we all stumble through life chasing things that may never exist.

Angelopoulos weaves myth and reality with remarkable grace. The opening is pure cinema: darkness, a child’s voice reciting a creation story, then a crack of light through the door. From there the journey unfolds in fragments—encounters that are tender, brutal, or dreamlike.

Eleni Karaindrou’s score drifts over foggy roads and empty stations, deepening the sense of exile. The children press on, dwarfed by history and representing a Greece that mirrors wider Europe—fractured, scarred by its past and oddly indifferent to its future. And just when despair threatens, Angelopoulos offers sudden joy—a motorbike ride to the sea—fleeting and unforgettable.

Slow, strange, and beautiful, it’s less about childhood than about all of us, walking through the mist in search of light.