Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête)

In collaboration with the Plein-Air Festival by the French Institute of Greece.

The movie will be screened with greek SDH subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

Entrance with free-admission tickets, distributed one hour before the screening.

Director: Jean Cocteau
Starring: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair
Runtime: 93’
Year of Production: 1946
Language: French
Subtitles: Greek

Even until the late ‘80s, forty years after its first appearance, Jean Cocteau's poetic jewel on the classical story was still glittering to the cinema audience. The advent of CGI has since aged the film in a flash - or sobered our sense of spectacle and our tolerance for cinematic fairy tales. Depending on how you look at it.

Oddly this is a claim of the film today: The enjoyment of the fairy tale, the need for imagination, the space for poetry, that is, the creation within us. The film is a polar star for wounded post-war France; few films have so focused, stamped and defined subsequent French cinema. And, in practice now, this dream cinema, this embroidery of images, plasticity, fantasy, psychoanalytic dimension, romanticism and immense beauty remains a milestone moment of civilization in which cinema documented that anything was possible. The synthesis of all the above, together with Cocteau's proverbial ingenuity and the exquisite photography made from references to Flemish masters and lighting by the great Henri Alekan, define perhaps the ultimate moment of handmade cinema of the European ‘40s. Ilias Dimopoulos