The best Vangelis Kazan’s war movies

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou) plots revenge on her mother (Aliki Georgouli) for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis), a young anti-fascist rebel.

"A," a Greek filmmaker living in exile in the United States, returns to his native Ptolemas to attend a special screening of one of his extremely controversial films. But A's real interest lies elsewhere--the mythical reels of the very first film shot by the Manakia brothers, who, at the dawn of the age of cinema, tirelessly criss-crossed the Balkans and, without regard for national and ethnic strife, recorded the region's history and customs. Did these primitive, never-developed images really exist?

We are in 1942, in the middle of the German Occupation, on an island opposite the coast of Asia Minor, where a mature woman, Katerina Rodeli, cares for a wounded resistance fighter named Kanaris. In her memory, there are images of the past, the panic of the Asia Minor catastrophe and especially the entrance of the tsets in her village. There she lost her three-year-old son, Konstantin, whom he never ceased to look for. However, the village's mackerel maharagrite handed it over to the Germans and, in the face of the danger, they were arrested along with the wounded and a boat ride on the Turkish coast to find themselves immediately enclosed in a refugee camp. His commander is a tough second lieutenant, Osen, who is bought by the English consulate of Izmir to transfer the fugitives to Egypt.

Karl (Petros Fyssoun) is a German officer who falls for a young Greek woman of Jewish ancestry in this symbolic war drama. He wants to marry Lisa (Elli Fotiou), but he dutifully turns her over to the Gestapo when she reveals she is Jewish. Karl learns of the Nazi atrocities when he is transferred to the Eastern Front. At the end of the war, a dejected Karl returns to Athens in hopes of being reunited with the woman whom he willingly turned over to authorities and who ended up in a concentration camp. The premise of the story is hard to take because Lisa was well aware of Karl's rampant anti-Semitic beliefs when her uncle overheard Karl making a speech.

A quartet of short stories about Greece during the various occupations during World War 2