Theo Angelopoulos talks to the media during a news conference to present the film To Livadi pou Dakrisi (The Weeping Meadow) as part of the 54th Berlinale International Film Festival in 2004 (Reuters).

Award-winning director Theo Angelopoulos died at the age of 76 in an Athens hospital on Tuesday, hours after a motorbike ran him over while he was filming a movie on location on the country’s debt crisis.

 

Winner of awards including the prestigious Cannes Palme D'Or prize in 1998 for Eternity and a Day and the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 1995 for Ulysses' Gaze, Angelopoulos had started shooting his new film, The Other Sea, earlier this month.

 

The film was about the impact of the crisis in everyday life.

 

Angelopoulos was crossing a road on Tuesday evening at about 7pm when he was hit by the motorcycle.

 

Police said the accident happened on the Drapetsona regional motorway, in Piraeus, after the first tunnel, in the lane leading to Keratsini.

 

He was immediately transferred to hospital in Faliro, where he died. He had suffered severe head wounds and bodily injuries, including to his spleen.

 

"He was in the middle of a shooting when the motorcycle hit him. He suffered multiple brain injuries and internal bleeding," said a police official who declined to be named. The motorcycle belonged to a policeman who was off duty, the official said.

 

 

The elegiac poet of Greek cinematography, with a career spanning more than four decades, Angelopoulos was born in April 1935, and studied law at Athens University.

 

After his military service, he went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne where he initially studied French philosophy, cinematography and ethnology, but soon dropped out to study film at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) and the Musée de l'Homme research center.

 

After his return to Greece, in 1964, he worked until 1967 as a journalist and film critic for the Dimokratiki Allaghi (Democratic Change) newspaper.

 

In 1978 he was a jury member at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.

 

Angelopoulos became involved with cinematography in 1965, producing his first short film, The Broadcast, in 1968, which was presented at the International Thessaloniki Film Festival and won the Greek critics' award.

 

This was followed by a series of political feature films in the 1970s about modern Greece. His first feature film, The Reconstruction (1970), which marked the dawn of modern Greek cinema, also won the top award (critics' award) at the International Thessaloniki Film Festival, as well as the awards for best director, best cinematography, best film and best actress, while it further received several distinctions abroad, including the 1971 Georges Sadoul Award as best film of the year shown in France and the 1971 best foreign film award at the Hyeres Film Festival.

 

He developed a trademark style marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative characterised by long takes such as in The Travelling Players (1975), which consists of just 80 shots in some four hours of film, which frequently contained meticulously choreographed and complex scenes involving numerous actors.

Considered by some respected international film critics as one of the world’s greatest directors. (Reuters, AMNA)