Homer’s Odyssey as you’ve never seen it before… NOSTOS: THE RETURN (1989)
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LOST IN THE ARTHOUSE is a monthly series hosted by Arkadin co-owner Keith Watson that takes you to hidden corners of filmdom far from Hollywood. From must-see classics to obscurities waiting to be discovered, these films stand at cinema’s bleeding edge.
“A poetry of lived quotidian experience that gradually becomes an epic… [Nostos] is simply beautiful. A masterpiece.” – L’Unità
While Christopher Nolan has given us the bombastic big-budget version of The Odyssey, Italian filmmaker Franco Piavoli’s Nostos: The Return sits at the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on humankind’s relationship to nature and its thirst for exploration that boils Homer’s epic down to a raw, timeless essence. Filmed in the Mediterranean and told in an imaginary proto-language drawn from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Nostos transports the viewer back to the dawn of civilization, reimagining Odysseus’s journey not as an action-adventure yarn but as a journey of the soul. Told with images of haunting power in a style Piavoli described as “symphonic” rather than the “theatrical” mode favored by conventional narrative cinema, Nostos is, in its transcendent beauty and cosmic scope, just as epic as Nolan’s blockbuster version. Rarely screened in the U.S., this largely unknown masterpiece of world cinema is crying out for discovery.
“A poetry of lived quotidian experience that gradually becomes an epic… [Nostos] is simply beautiful. A masterpiece.” – L’Unità
While Christopher Nolan has given us the bombastic big-budget version of The Odyssey, Italian filmmaker Franco Piavoli’s Nostos: The Return sits at the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on humankind’s relationship to nature and its thirst for exploration that boils Homer’s epic down to a raw, timeless essence. Filmed in the Mediterranean and told in an imaginary proto-language drawn from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Nostos transports the viewer back to the dawn of civilization, reimagining Odysseus’s journey not as an action-adventure yarn but as a journey of the soul. Told with images of haunting power in a style Piavoli described as “symphonic” rather than the “theatrical” mode favored by conventional narrative cinema, Nostos is, in its transcendent beauty and cosmic scope, just as epic as Nolan’s blockbuster version. Rarely screened in the U.S., this largely unknown masterpiece of world cinema is crying out for discovery.
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