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Three films, a Trilogy. A poetic summing up of the century that just ended and a visionary relationship with the century we are now traversing through a love affair that challenges time. Three films that are, however, autonomous.
A story that begins in Odessa in 1919 with the entry of the Red Army into the city and ends in present-day New York. Exile, separation, wandering, the end of ideologies and the constant trials of history. The titles of the three films could be: Kingdom and Exile, The end of Utopia, and the Eternal Return. Perhaps. I preferred three more down-to-earth titles: The Weeping Meadow. The Third Wing. Return.
THE WEEPING MEADOW, the first of the three films, is but the root of the myth. One will recognize traces from Oedipus Rex and Seven Against Thebes in the course of a love affair and the fate of a woman.
It is the first time since 'Reconstruction' in 1970 that the pivotal figure in a film of mine is a woman. A child who knows exile and death, a love-struck adolescent, a mother, a solitary woman. From innocence to tragic passion. More than at any other time before, an elegy on human fate. The Helen (Eleni) of myth, the Helen of all myths claims, and is claimed by, the absolute of love. Her dead husband’s last letter from the battlefront at Okinawa in the South Pacific in 1945 ends with a dream: '…you bent down and spread your hand on the wet grass. When you raised it, a few drops trickled and dripped. Like tears on the earth…'
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