AMID a sea of homogeneous and formulaic cinema, the ambition of Theo Angelopoulos's epic journey of homecoming, Ulysses' Gaze, has to be saluted. Tracing an exiled Greek film director's search for three reels of film shot by the first Greek film-makers, the Manakis brothers, this is a three-hour meditation on the history of the Balkans.
The quest for the lost reels encompasses "the whole human adventure" and takes the phlegmatic hero "A" (Harvey Keitel) from Greece to Albania, to Bucharest and Constanza and finally to Sarajevo.
The film's style moves fluidly between heightened naturalism, theatrical set pieces and dream-like tableaux, emphasising the circularity of this century's history and the sense of loss and grief as he returns to the location of the Balkan conflict that triggered the first World War.
The relationship between cinema and history is explored throughout, with a moral and spiritual earnestness that is reminiscent of Tarkovsky. The film's obvious flaws and exasperating portentousness can't detract from the beauty and resonance of the images Angelopoulos has created.
These serve to heighten the impact when A's utopian attempt to recapture the "pure unsullied gaze" of the Manakis brothers is finally frustrated and there are no images left to accompany the sound of gunfire - just a blank, white screen, projecting the despair of a voiceless scream.
Best Children's Film: Alfonso Cuaron's magical adaptation of The Little Princess brings new life to Frances Hodgson Burnett's celebration of generosity and courage.
Best Literary Adaptation:
Roger Michell's engaging, social realist version of Austen's Persuasion is a subtly comic study of a society in transition, which avoids the dreaded history-of-interiors approach to literary adaptations.
Films I admired but didn't review:
Todd Haynes's uncomfortable, teasing and complex study of social and personal malaise, Safe, with a superb performance from Julianne Moore; and John T. Davis's undeniably self-important but extremely moving, lovingly made excavation of his own family history, The Uncle Jack, co-directed and edited by Se Merry Doyle.