Theo Angelopoulos (born April 27, 1936) is a noted Greek film director. Angelopoulos studied law in Athens, but after his military service went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. He soon dropped out to study film at the IDHEC (Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies) before returning to Greece. There, he worked as a journalist and film critic.
Angelopoulos began making films after the 1967 coup that began the Greek military dictatorship known as the Regime of the Colonels. He made his first short film in 1968 and in the 1970s began making a series of political feature films about modern Greece: Days of '36 (Meres Tou 36, 1972), The Travelling Players(O Thiassos, 1975) and The Hunters (I Kynighoi, 1977). He quickly established a characteristic style, marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative structures and long takes (The Travelling Players, for example, consists of only 80 shots in about four hours of film).
After the end of the dictatorship, Angelopoulos moved into less political works, gaining Italian funding.
His regular collaborators include the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, and the composer Eleni Karaindrou.
The film critic David Thomson counted Angelopoulos as one of the world's greatest living directors in his 1994 Biographical Dictionary of Film.
