Orpheus: Jean Cocteau Film Screening at Pantheon Theatre Nicosia

This weekly film screening in Nicosia, Cyprus is presented by STYX Film Encounters at the Pantheon Theatre, Diagorou 29, on Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 17:30. The film is Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950), running for 1 hour and 35 minutes, with English and Greek subtitles. An introduction will be given by Sofronis Sofroniou.

The screening closes the curated programme «✦°⊛ Is It Magic? ✦°⊛» (March 22 – May 3), which brings together films across horror, animation, fantasy, melodrama, and myth around a shared theme: magic as a human faculty — not the supernatural, but the mind's capacity to transform reality through desire, fear, memory, and imagination.

Cocteau's Orpheus relocates the classical myth to contemporary Paris, where Orpheus becomes a modern poet drawn into an ambiguous relationship with a Princess who embodies Death. Mirrors serve as portals, radio messages replace divine prophecy, and the underworld appears as a stark bureaucratic space. Rather than simply adapting the myth, Cocteau reworks it through cinema itself — reverse motion, mirror effects, and slowed movement make the screen the medium through which passage between worlds becomes possible. Often cited as the central work of his Orphic trilogy, Orpheus remains a key postwar film in which poetry, myth, and modernism converge.

For more information and ticketing details, please contact the organiser directly.