Photopolis Agrinio Photo Festival has the pleasure of hosting the work “The Gaze of Eternity” by Ilias Bourgiotis in its central events.
The photographer did the backstage photography of the last three films of Theodoros Angelopoulos. With material, mainly from the creator’s latest film, the photographer tries to capture the timelessness of his thought and work.

The photographer says:
«In the mid-1980s, I set out on a photographic quest in the Greek countryside to get to know Greece through its ordinary, everyday activity, its customs and traditions. I wasn’t interested in recording these customs but in observing human interactions at these events. These sojourns were published in my first photographic collection, Invisible Greece.
One creator whose work I found enchanting was the director Theo Angelopoulos. I was impressed by how he filmed, his shots, his photography, the film scores he chose. In his work, I saw the Greece that I had encountered in my travels, the historical and political memories that are slowly fading. I’ve always wanted to be in his orbit while he’s filming, to get to to know him, to communicate with him, to photograph him off the set. This was what interested me most, it would bring my lens to his creative work, to those moments driven by the rhythms of preparation, those moments when the focus was behind the camera.
The first time we met at Lake Kerkini, he asked why I wanted to photograph the backstage of his films. That’s when I gave him my book, Invisible Greece. He looked at me with a welcoming smile. And the journey continued…until the last frame of him I shot that horrid night at Keratsini, just a few minutes before fate struck leaving his film, The Other Sea, incomplete.
It was that last portrait of him that I shot that inspired this book’s title, The Gaze of Eternity. No single volume can contain the body of this work, but I do hope that it does convey something from the wealth and magic that touched all those whose lives I observed and photographed at Theo Angelopoulos’s side.