Nikos Panagiotopoulos

Nikos Panagiotopoulos was born in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, in November 1941, into a lower-middle-class family, and it was there that he first saw films. He studied film in Athens and learned the trade as an assistant director on Greek and foreign productions, mostly commercial popular films; he often recalled his apprenticeship with popular directors such as Stelios Tatasopoulos. Paris, however, was the city that shaped him. He lived there from 1960 to 1973, attended film courses at the Sorbonne and spent long hours at the Cinémathèque française, where he discovered the classics of cinema on the big screen. As students, he and Theo Angelopoulos even shared a flat.

Back in Athens in 1973, he made a few short films and then his first feature, Τα χρώματα της ίριδας (The Colours of Iris, 1974). In his later years he worked at a remarkable pace, almost a film a year. His second wife, the costume designer Marianna Spanoudaki, designed the costumes for his productions. He also wrote: an autobiographical book, Από το καλάθι των αχρήστων (From the Wastepaper Basket), and a novel, Τίποτα (Nothing).

He died of a heart attack in January 2016, aged 74. His seventeenth film, Η κόρη του Ρέμπραντ (Rembrandt's Daughter), had left cinemas only days before, and he had already shot the first week of the next one, Amor fati.

Panagiotopoulos refused to be tied to one style. He moved between surrealism, noir, melodrama, the musical and the road movie, and in Beautiful People (2001) he even reworked Godard's Contempt. He disliked realism and preaching: «Δεν θέλω να καταγγείλω τίποτα» (I do not want to denounce anything), he told the newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton. An assistant once called his films “comedies of mystery”, and he said he would happily place his whole work under that title.

His best-known film, Οι τεμπέληδες της εύφορης κοιλάδας (The Idlers of the Fertile Valley, 1978), adapts a novel by Albert Cossery, an Egyptian-born writer who wrote in French. A wealthy father and his three sons withdraw to a country villa and give themselves over to sleep, while a young maid does all the work; only the youngest son tries to break free. Many viewers read it as an allegory of the dictatorship and of a ruling class in decline. Dark and full of symbols, it was still a commercial success, and it won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.

Later films reached wide audiences: Ο εργένης (The Bachelor, 1997), from a novel by Vangelis Raptopoulos, and Αυτή η νύχτα μένει (Edge of Night, 1999), whose title song by Stamatis Kraounakis became a huge hit. Delivery (2004), selected for the competition at Venice, follows a young pizza delivery man on his scooter through the hidden corners of Athens.

Panagiotopoulos remains a figure apart in the New Greek Cinema: of Angelopoulos's generation, yet always on his own path. His films keep returning in retrospectives; in 2022, for example, Istanbul's Pera Museum screened The Idlers of the Fertile Valley in Greek with subtitles. For a B2 task, take the festival synopsis of Delivery and retell its opening in Greek with sequence and movement words: Πρώτα κατεβαίνει από το λεωφορείο (First he gets off the bus), Μετά κοιμάται στον σταθμό (Then he sleeps at the station), Το επόμενο πρωί ψάχνει δουλειά (The next morning he looks for work). Then add where he rides on his scooter. These are our own practice sentences, not dialogue from the film. If you can watch a short scene from The Idlers, use subtitles and describe only what you see.

• As students in Paris, he and Theo Angelopoulos shared a flat, although their films later went in very different directions.
• The Idlers of the Fertile Valley was shot in a mansion in Kifisia, a leafy northern suburb of Athens.
• Lefteris Vogiatzis won the Best Actor award at the San Remo festival for Ονειρεύομαι τους φίλους μου (I Dream of My Friends, 1993), based on stories by Dimitris Nollas.
• He declared himself «υπέρ της ταπεινής τέχνης» (in favour of humble art) and said that in a cheap film you are very free.