The film Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea) was to be Theo Angelopoulos’ concluding film for the trilogy that began with Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2003) and continued with Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008). But early during the 2012 filming of The Other Sea he was struck by a motorcycle on the set of his film in Piraeus and died several hours later. In these few pages I wish to share both the nature of this unfinished odyssey he was filming and my personal experience with this tragically interrupted project. But first we should acknowledge the importance of ‘unfinished’ and ‘interrupted’ to his over-thirty-eight years of filmmaking. British critic Peter Bradshaw put it well at the time of Angelopoulos’ passing when he wrote about his death on the set of his then current film:

Bradshaw has captured the spirit and reality of this memorable Greek filmmaker, and his words gesture towards the focus of my essay, for I had personally known Theo – as I shall refer to him – since the early 1970s in Athens when I was both a film critic for The Athenian English-language magazine at the time and a film and literature professor at Deree College.

Over the years I came to admire and appreciate his films so much that I published two books and numerous essays and articles on his films and was honoured that on many of my cinematic study tours of Greece that I have led since 1980, he and Phoebe Economopoulos, his partner (they were never officially married) and producer, would meet with my students to discuss his films. Ironically, however, for so many years of being in touch and getting to know him and his memorable films, I had never actually been on the set for any of the his films in production.