In 1999, an American film director of Greek descent named A receives a phone call from his melancholic daughter at the Cinecittà studio. He rushes back to his apartment in Rome, where he finds a letter his mother, Eleni, wrote to his father, Spyros, in 1956. In 1953, Eleni and Jacob, a Jew of German descent, watch the newsreel in Temirtau. Spyros gets there. Spyros and Eleni jump onto a tram, leaving Jacob alone. The tram arrives at the public square in front of the government office, where Stalin's death is announced to the people. That night, immediately after Spyros and Eleni make love on the tram, the two are arrested and taken away separately. In 1956, in Siberia, Eleni puts her three-year-old son on the train bound for Moscow, where Jacob's older sister will take care of him. On New Year's Eve in 1973, Eleni and Jacob cross the border from Hungary to Austria. After celebrating the New Year together, Eleni ends her relationship with Jacob, encouraging him to go on to Israel. In summer 1974, Eleni finally finds Spyros in the suburbs of New York. However, she leaves without saying anything to him after she realized that he is already married to another woman. In winter 1974, Eleni crosses the border from the United States to Canada. There, she and A meet again for the first time in many years. A drives Spyros over to a bar in Ontario, where Eleni works. Spyros enters the bar and makes an offer of marriage to Eleni. The two hug and kiss each other. In 1999, Eleni and Spyros arrive in Berlin. Jacob visits the hotel they are staying at. The three go out in the rain and dance to the gypsy music at the station. There, Eleni feels dizzy. Spyros makes a phone call to A and is informed that their granddaughter has been found. Eleni and Spyros go to the old building where their granddaughter barricades herself along with drug addicts and vagabonds. Eleni enters the building and rescues her granddaughter. They go back to A's apartment in Berlin, and Eleni lies down on the bed in her granddaughter's room. After visiting Eleni, Jacob commits suicide by drowning himself in the Spree river. On New Year's Day in 2000, Eleni dies. Spyros and his granddaughter look out of the window. After a while, the two are seen smiling and running hand in hand under the Brandenburg Gate in the snow.
The Dust of Time was shot over a four-month period, starting in 2007. Filming took place in Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Greece.
The Dust of Time received some positive reviews in the Greek press. Peter Brunette of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a mixed review, stating that the plot had improbable situations and describing the film as "a curious mixture of the brilliant and the absurd." Dan Fainaru of Screen International felt that it is Theodoros Angelopoulos' most affecting and personal film in years. Derek Elley of Variety criticized the film as "a tired-looking attempt to say something significant by a 73-year-old auteur who has neither anything significant left to say nor the cinematic smarts to say it with." Vrasidas Karalis found the film to suffer from overplotting, and viewed its "depictions of intersecting temporalities" as inventive but confusing. In the book Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, Angelos Koutsourakis wrote that "the expository dialogue often comes across as wooden" and stated that the film had a "bristling recalcitrance". Ronald Bergan was more positive, writing in The Guardian that "the film sometimes veers from the profound to the portentous, from the sublimely ridiculous to the ridiculously sublime. However, these weaknesses fade beside the strength of the great set pieces and the passion of the narrative." In a press conference for the Greek media, the director was asked about the critics for his film and replied that "the directors are not chosen by the critics or by the audience but by the time" and that for him all of his films are chapters of the same films, "Chapters, as he said, of a big book, about human destiny, about the times passed and about the times coming".
