Short Bio

Lefteris Xanthopoulos

    Lefteris Xanthopoulos was born in Athens, 1945. He studied law at the University of Athens but never took his degree exams. He went on to study cinematography in England at the London Film School and following that he lived for more than ten years in various countries of Central and Northern Europe.
    He has directed a large number of documentary films: The Greek Community in Heidelberg (1976), Giorgos from Sotirianika (1978), On the Tourkovounia (In Athens Today) (1982), At Colonus (1983), The Great Procession (1988), Pavlos Zannas (1988), Who the Crazy Hare is (1993), The Dark Conspirator (1998) and many others.
His first full-length feature documentary film Happy Homecoming, Comrade (Beloiannisz), filmed in 1985 in Hungary, was an award-winning film at the 39th Locarno Film Festival. His second film Master of the Shadows (O Drapetis) (1991) was an official entry in the Directors’ Fortnight Program of the 44th Cannes Film Festival.
    In January 1967, Xanthopoulos’ poems received an award at the 3rd Pan-Hellenic Poetry Competition held by the university student magazine Panspoudastiki. In 1972, his first poetry collection Antipsycha (2nd edition 1992) was published. These poetry collections soon followed: The Adventures of a Vagrant Dream Guard (1982), Keep your Chin up, Father (1995), The Rush of the Stormy Waters (1998), Why Women Don’t Love the Rain (2004), The Seventh Rain (2010) and the prose Angel of the First Days (novel), (1999) and Cats elsewhere (short stories), (2011).
    Among his many recent projects are documentaries including: Giorgios N. Papanikolaou – Pap Test (2008), At Home by the seα – The novelist  E. H. Papadi-mitrakopoulos (2007), A Magnificent Person – The mathematician Konstantinos Karatheodori (2006), The Garden With the Innumerable Windows – The painter Nikos Engonopoulos (2005), Inheritor of Birds – The poet Miltos Sahtouris (2004) and many more.