Xenia

A big hit on the film festival circuit, Greek director Panos H. Koutras's drama Xenia centers on headstrong, erratic Dany (Kostas Nikouli), a gay teen whose dissolute Albanian mother has just died. Living in Crete, Dany sets off to find his older brother, Ody—short for Odysseus (Nikos Gelia)—in Athens to give him the bad news. Their dysfunctional mother failed to secure the boys' legal residency in the country, and with their Greek father long since vanished, Ody and Dany are essentially stateless. Together, the pair embark on a journey to find their father, hoping to make him acknowledge their existence and give them money and resources. Along the way, the siblings run into problems with both the police and Greek nationalists who assault non-Greeks in the streets. Dany, while charismatic, proves even more unstable when he gets hold of a gun, and his relationship with a pet rabbit proves to be not quite what it seems (the rabbit later shows up as a talking giant in a couple of magical-realism scenes). Along the way, there are beautiful moments, such as a wondrous sequence in which a sleeping Dany and Ody float downriver on a stolen boat, witnessed by every kind of fairy-tale forest creature. All of this points toward a confrontation between the brothers and a man who may or may not be their father. Recommended. (T. Keogh)