Lola Montes

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: Max Ophüls
Starring: Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook
Runtime: 114'
Year of Production: 1955
Language: French
Subtitles: Greek

"Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the most scandalous woman in the world!" This phrase is heard in the circus where Lola Montes appears every night, to impress audiences by recounting her past triumphs, telling stories from her glory days as a femme fatale, dancer and mistress of 19th century artists and kings and turning herself into the spectacle itself and us into circus spectators. 

Through his last work, and having at his disposal the highest budget ever available for a European film up to the time, Max Ophils ("The Earrings of Madame de…") said goodbye to cinema with a sublime creation whose dazzling beauty rivaled the abundant innovations in structure and storytelling. However, like almost every avant-garde artwork, the unorthodox "Lola Montes" was wildly misunderstood in its time. It perplexed the audience, was a resounding failure in movie theaters, suffered indiscriminate and disastrous editing interventions (made against the director's will) and was for decades screened with Ophils' vision fully shattered.

Only the film's strenuous digital restoration has given the opportunity to see in full what has rightly been called one of the most beautiful (and, for many, best) films ever made, though the movie's value is not limited to its aesthetic virtues alone but expands as a complex (perhaps prophetic) contemplation on the relentless and cannibalistic power of spectacle, the notion of the objectification of women, and the greatest performance in the world, which is none other than human life. Loukas Katsikas