The hunters

New Year’s Eve, 1977. A group of hunters near Ioannina Lake discover the body of a partisan from the Civil War buried in the snow – his wound still bleeding, though the war ended nearly thirty years ago. The hunters, all members of the political and economic elite (including a reformed leftist), bring the corpse back to their hotel. There, during a haunted New Year’s Eve, they are forced to confront the ghosts of history and their buried past.

Along with O Thiasos (The Travelling Players, 1975) and Meres tou ’36 (Days of '36, 1972), the film belongs to the "Trilogy of History". These three films also share almost the same cast. Filming took place in the Ioannina prefecture. There are two versions of the film (168 minutes and 144 minutes). The second one, which appeared years later from the Swiss company Trigon-film, is, according to them, the director's preferred version—and thus a director’s cut—since Angelopoulos himself had made the edits. The film sold 105,645 tickets and ranked first among the 17 Greek films of the season. The film had its Greek premiere at the 1977 Thessaloniki Anti-Festival.