All the world's a stage, but for the travelling theatre troupe at the heart of Theo Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players, that stage keeps shifting under their feet. Constructed in just eighty shots, Angelopoulos epic voyage through Greek history from wars to revolutions, fascism to communism, firing squads to folk songs, is in many ways the pinnacle of a type of cinema that no longer exists.

Commonly regarded as the crowning achievement of Angelopoulos' marrying of myth and history, The Travelling Players is an intimate epic of love and death, led by Angelopoulos and cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis' camera, which circles and snakes through the players lives unravelling layers of memory and history, and collapsing time and space as it goes.

'Angelopoulos's concern in this, Greece's most ambitious, most experimental, and most expensive film made until 1975, is with a journey into "the other Greece," historically and culturally, through time. His concern is also with the presentation and reconstruction of that history and culture. More accurately, he is at pains to make the viewer aware to what degree history and culture are figments of presentation and enactments of "scripts" written and unwritten, remembered and forgotten, which continually reappear in reconstructions that echo the past yet point toward a future, uncertain as it may be.' – Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos