When Theo Angelopoulos began production on The Travelling Players, Greece was under the rule of the Colonels’ Dictatorship. His vision of one of the most turbulent periods in his country’s history was hardly something the military junta’s censors would have approved. In his film, Angelopoulos uses a family tragedy to explore the wounds left by the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, the Nazi occupation, and the Greek Civil War. Evading censorship was the first major achievement of one of the most significant works in the history of cinema, an epic that offers a portrait of modern Greek history.

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