Cannes Film Festival Classics is a special section of the Cannes Film Festival dedicated to the history of cinema.
It showcases restored classic films, historical documentaries, tributes to major filmmakers, anniversary screenings, and rare films.
Launched in 2004, it functions as a kind of “museum” of cinematic heritage within the festival.
In the 23 years of the section’s existence, no Greek film had ever been screened there. Until this year.
The restored version of Eva (1953), the fourth film by Maria Plyta (1915–2006), is changing that.
The film tells the story of a married woman who, during her summer vacation, experiences a brief romance with a younger man, provoking the anger of her husband and the gossip of the island’s conservative society.
Film theorists consider Eva a lost masterpiece of European cinema because it contains elements of the French New Wave* two years before La Pointe Courte by Agnès Varda, which is considered a precursor of the movement.
The film stars N. Sgouridou, A. Alexandrakis, and M. Katrakis. The sets were designed by Yannis Tsarouchis, while the music was composed by Mikis Theodorakis in his first-ever film score.
*A French cinematic movement of the 1950s–60s that established modernism in cinema.
Maria Plyta was the first female director in the history of Greek cinema and remains the Greek woman director with the most feature films to her name (17 films, mostly commercial productions), active between the 1950s and the 1970s.
She initially worked in literature before entering film production in the late 1940s, collaborating on films by A. Sakellarios and G. Tzavellas.
One reason is that many of her films belonged to the melodrama genre (such as O Loustrakos), a style later looked down upon compared to the comedies and social dramas of “old Greek cinema.”
However, her marginalization was also tied to the gender discrimination of the era. As a woman filmmaker, she remained largely invisible in a male-dominated industry.
The restoration of Eva was undertaken by the World Cinema Project* of Martin Scorsese and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, Alatas Films, Aristotle University professor Betty-Despina Kaklamanidou, and the Greek Film Archive.
The project was supported by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation of George Lucas.
*Founded in 2007 to locate, restore, and preserve important films from world cinema that have been neglected or are at risk of being lost.
This year’s Cannes Classics will also be dedicated to the memory of Greek-American Dean Tavoularis, the acclaimed production designer who passed away in April at the age of 93.
Oscar winner Dean Tavoularis collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on 13 films, including The Godfather trilogy, and also worked with filmmakers such as Wim Wenders.
