Film director Angelopoulos dies - The Best from Greece

Award-winning director Theo Angelopoulos died at the age of 76 in an Athens hospital on Tuesday, hours after a motorbike ran him over while he was filming a movie on location on the country’s debt crisis.

 

Winner of awards including the prestigious Cannes Palme D'Or prize in 1998 for Eternity and a Day and the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 1995 for Ulysses' Gaze, Angelopoulos had started shooting his new film, The Other Sea, earlier this month.

 

The film was about the impact of the crisis in everyday life.

 

Angelopoulos was crossing a road on Tuesday evening at about 7pm when he was hit by the motorcycle.

Police said the accident happened on the Drapetsona regional motorway, in Piraeus, after the first tunnel, in the lane leading to Keratsini.

 

He was immediately transferred to hospital in Faliro.

 

"He was in the middle of a shooting when the motorcycle hit him. He suffered multiple brain injuries and internal bleeding," said a police official who declined to be named. The motorcycle belonged to a policeman who was off duty, the official said. (Reuters, AMNA)