The King

A thirty-five year old man comes out of prison wanting to cut his ties with the big city and with his own past. He withdraws to the abandoned village his father came from and settles into an old house on the point of collapse. He does odd jobs to stay on his feet and keeps to himself. But the villagers nearby treat him as an uninvited guest, and suspicion and contempt do not let go of him. Then his girlfriend from Athens turns up, and the past has found him. Nikos Grammatikos based the film on a true story. The telling is slow; the real question is not the crime but whether a person is allowed to start again where he has gone. Vangelis Mourikis's performance sits at the centre of it. It is one of the rural stories Greek cinema was telling in those years.