A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile. The man, away in the Soviet Union for 32 years and now stateless, finds himself at the beginning of a journey, and Angelopoulos evokes the past, present and future to bridge the gap between reality and imagination.
Voyage to Cythera won the Best Screenplay and the Fipresci Prize at the 1984 Cannes Festival. It is a journey to the dark side of Greek history where it crosses paths with myth - Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the isle of dreams where one can dedicate oneself to happiness, or the pursuit thereof. It is about an old man - the country's leftist past - who cannot become reconciled to his country's present. Or perhaps it is Greece that is not ready to come to grips with its past.