Iphigenia

Director: Michael Cacoyannis

1977 / 127min / 16mm

The final film of Cacoyannis’s “Greek Tragedy” trilogy, following 1962’s Electra and 1971’s The Trojan Woman, adapts Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, with an exceptional Tatiana Papamoschou as the waifish, doe-eyed daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and Kostas Kazakos and Irene Papas—the latter a throughline in the trilogy—as her royal parents, commanded to sacrifice their daughter so the Greek fleets might set sail for Helen and for Troy. Bringing a naturalistic touch to the lyric drama and grounding it in real locations, including the ruins of Mycenae and the breathtaking Peloponnese coast, Cacoyannis gives us an Iphigenia that’s faithful but not slavishly so, true to the world of antiquity yet bracingly immediate.

Print courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research

Distributor: Park Circus

Part of Classical Cinema