Sensitively directed by Nikos Koundouros, winner of the Best Director prize at the Berlin Film Festival, this erotically charged cinematic poem about the play of love and sex against the larger cycles of nature was an international sensation. Set in 200 B.C. and shot on-location amidst authentic Greek ruins and landscapes, "Young Aphrodites" (1963) is really two parallel stories about adolescent shepherds and village girls on the verge of sexual awakening whose primitive courting and loss of innocence finds symbolic kinship with the interplay of life and death that surrounds them. An intoxicating and unforgettable cinematic experience.
