Ulysses’ Gaze 1995

Successful Greek filmmaker A (Harvey Keitel) returns to Greece to attend a screening of one of his earlier works and to embark on a personal journey across the Balkans. When the screening is disrupted by a clash of local ideologies, A leaves Greece by taxi for Albania, driven by a quest for three undeveloped reels credited to the Manaki brothers—reels that might even predate the brothers’ landmark film, The Weavers, long regarded as the first film shot in the Balkans.

A’s journey becomes a delicate fusion of memory, cinematic history, and the evolving face of the Balkans. The journey threads together his own recollections with the legacy of the Manaki brothers and contemporary images from the region. He drifts across Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, moving by train, a barge carrying a Lenin statue named Polyphemus, and finally a small rowboat. Along the way he makes a few acquaintances, but he rarely lingers, pulled onward by a search for the roots of cinema, memory, and Balkan identity, a pursuit that steadily edges toward decay and mortality.

His voyage ultimately leads to the besieged city of Sarajevo, where he encounters Ivo Levy (Erland Josephson), the curator of an underground cinema archive who had already attempted to salvage the missing reels before the war. A persuades Levy to persevere with the project, urging him to keep the reels and the stories they carry alive.

The film culminates on a rare foggy day in Sarajevo. The mist offers a quiet space in which locals can move and function away from the danger of snipers, giving the city a fragile, unexpected chance to flourish. A explores the city alongside Levy’s family, and near the river they encounter military personnel, with tragic consequences as the family is executed. Through its quiet, persistent gaze, the movie traces how memory, cinema, and place intertwine even amid conflict, leaving a haunting meditation on the stakes of preserving history.