The Trojan Women

Culture is knocking to the doors of ChiosRadio.gr and this time we will talk about one movie from the seventies relating to one of the most famous tragedies from the Ancient Greece: The Trojan Wars. The film is called "The Trojan Women" and was released in 1971 with its script based in the English translation by Edith Hamilton.

It is a film that represents one of the tragedies that Euripides wrote about the Trojan Wars, originally in the books is part of a tetralogy but in this movie we see the consequences of the end of the war between Greeks and Trojans for the Trojan people and especially for the Royal Trojan Women whose future is destined to be assigned to one of the Greek winners by draw or becomes slaves.

This movie is a tragedy centering on the horror of the war and the wild and barbaric actions that both winners and defeated are forced to carry out. We see how the destiny from the Royal Trojan Women as Hecuba (Queen of Troy), Andromache (Hector´s widow), Cassandra (Hecuba´s daughter) and Helena (the reason from the Trojan War), is decided, they know that they will be taken as slaves or concubines by the Greek men. Besides the Greeks want to end the Royal Trojan bloodline and they decide to murder Hector and Andromache´s son: Astyanax, this action symbolizes the suffering that the Greeks wanted to cause to the Trojans.

This horrible actions and the hell on Earth that all the participants are forced to go through make some of the main characters as Hecuba questioning the Faith in the gods as well as man´s dependence on them. We undergo at the same time that the main characters and we suffer with them when they are separated from their children, denied their mourning and destined for slavery. Euripides expresses the story and the suffering of these women as he imagines it.

"The Trojan Women" is directed by the Cypriot-Greek Michalis Cacoyannis, he was a Cypriot filmmaker, best known for his 1964 film "Zorba the Greek". Much of his work was rooted in classical texts, especially those of the Greek tragedies from Euripides. The main actresses of this movie are Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache, Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra and Irene Papas as Helen of Troy.

This is a part of the Greek myths and now more than ever they are a faithful representation of currently times, because for example in The Trojan Women one of the main subjects is the universal nature of man and human beings in general: the obsession for domination and power with no mercy or pity, the greed and the lust, that we can observe nowadays in many parts of our world.

We hope you enjoy as much as us this piece of Greek Cinema.