“For unto us a director is born” raved the Greek press after Macedonian Wedding first screened in 1960. And rightly so, for this short documentary that anointed the 27-year-old Takis Kanellopoulos as Greek cinema’s new hope overnight is a visual poem of rare sensitivity. What starts as a documentation of joyous wedding rites in an eastern Macedonian village (Velventos in Kozani) is transmuted through the director’s gaze into an elegy on the parting of ways – as if Persephone is to descend into Hades – and the chthonic, paganistic bite of the natural world. The germ of Kanellopoulos’ later work is already apparent here: the low-key tone, the lyricism, the Macedonian landscape, the charge borne by what is borderline, and the female face that so captivated him. Macedonian Wedding won Best Short Film at the First Week of Greek Cinema, and First Prize at the Belgrade Film Festival (1961).
Takis Kanellopoulos
Takis Kanellopoulos was born in Thessaloniki in 1933 and died in 1990 of a heart attack. He was one of the first Greek directors to make films in Thessaloniki. He was honoured at the 7th Thessaloniki Film Festival in 1966, on the occasion of his film Excursion, for his contribution to raising the quality standards of the festival. At the 1968 Thessaloniki Festival, Interlude won the Greek Film Critics Association Award for Best Director, while the same film was awarded Best Art Film of the Year, jointly with Vassilis Georgiadis’s Girls in the Sun. Kanellopoulos’s filmography consists of three shorts and seven feature films.