Electra

When Agamemnon returns from Troy he is killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. His daughter Electra is put out of the palace and married off to a peasant; his son Orestes is taken away as a small child. Years later, when Orestes comes back, Electra does not recognise him. Once she does, there is only one road in front of them both, and their mother stands at the end of it. Michael Cacoyannis took Euripides' play off the stage and carried it into the Greek countryside; the film was shot among stone, earth and wind. Irene Papas's Electra almost never softens. The music is by Mikis Theodorakis. The production took the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1962 and was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. It is the first of Cacoyannis's three adaptations of Greek tragedy; the others are The Trojan Women and Iphigenia. The ending does not offer revenge as a resolution.