Voyage to Cythera

Voyage to Cythera (, translit. Taxidi sta Kythira) is a 1984 Greek film directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos. It was entered into the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and the award for Best Screenplay. Plot A communist returns to Greece after decades of exile in the Soviet Union. He is disappointed by what he finds. Cast Manos Katrakis as Spyros Mary Chronopoulou as Voula Dionysis Papagiannopoulos as Antonis Dora Volanaki as Katerina Giulio Brogi as Alexandros Giorgos Nezos as Panagiotis Athinodoros Prousalis as chief of police Michael Giannatos as police officer Reception Richard Bernstein of The New York Times was unfavorable toward the work; he stated that there were "extraordinary scenes", but argued that "when the end comes, the viewer is left [...] with the vague unsettled feeling that, aside from gaining the knowledge that exile is emptiness, two and a half hours in the presence of much onscreen joylessness has produced little satisfaction." Bernstein contended that Voyage to Cythera is "like a slightly too long allegory whose moral you just don't get." A reviewer for Time Out was mixed, writing, "The first half of the film [...] is suffused with that peculiar melancholy which Angelopoulos has made entirely his own. One begins to lose the thread in the second half, however, when the old man and his wife are cast adrift on a symbolic voyage to Cythera, birthplace of Aphrodite".