AllMovie

Greek director Stelios Haralambopoulos weaves the classic myth of Alcestis -- who selflessly traveled into Hades to trade places with her sick husband Admetus -- into a modern parable rich in character and fraught with tension concerning the traumatic real-life events in the Balkans at the time. Manos (Yiorgos Moroyiannis) is a lawyer from Athens who must travel to a northern province to find a woman who had disappeared 20 years before. It's a welcome escape from his tedious marriage, but a strange new world for him. He finds that the woman he is searching for, Evanthia (Evri Sofroniadou), had married an ethnic Greek named Fanis (Periklis Moustakas), who was a refugee from the horrible bloodshed in Albania. Fanis had been compelled to return, but Evanthia (like Alcestis) had gone in his place. Now, Manos (like Admetus' famous friend Hercules in the myth) must cross the border into Albania/Hades and bring Evanthia back. A fascinatingly complex allegory, not the least for the dual "descents" which actually mirror the original myth in entirely different ways. Nadia Deliyianni and Dimitris Tzoumakis co-star.