The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The majority of Greek movies whose plot is mainly social, are bad. Extremely bad, to the point of boredom & depression. This is one of them.This movie is inspired by a hijack on a long-distance bus, that took place in North Greece in 1999, where an Albanian went mad, took hostages and went back to Albania, where the Albanian police shot him, along with a Greek passenger that resembled him.This could be an intense movie, but Giannaris preferred to rip-off some pieces of Speed, in a very bad way, adding to this mixture some very bad acting from the most actors and actresses, who sing like in a '50s Greek movie. Also, the death of the hijacker is one of the worst in cinema, ever made. The whole scene is hilariously bad.Don't watch it. Just don't.

I'm voting a 9, because it's a convincing, good film. But as far a it being a true story.... not exactly. I was in Greece on vacation in 1998 when this happened. At the time; Albanian refugees were living in Greece. Greeks felt sorry for them, as they do for so many others;( their biggest downfall), and allowed them into their homes, jobs, lives... and in return they robbed banks, killed their hosts and terrorized the country. This movie portrayed the situation as an innocent, good-looking boy treated as a slave in Greece. With a bus full of Stockholm syndrome victims!! And done so well; I almost fell for it. I heard the entire thing live on the radio; this bastard shoved the grenade in the lady's pants and threatened to pull the pin for hours; and then finally did.

Jesus. What a bore. This film is even worse than Romanian films (give or take one or two). The photography sucked big time (I think they shot it on digital format, you can almost tell by the plain two-dimensional shots, unimaginative hand held's, and dull colors - and don't tell me that's bleach-by-pass). I do know the Balkans are a very troubled region, where deep-seated xenophobia and nationalistic behavior make victims each and every year, yet this film didn't quite grasp that. The film is detached, not in a Michael Haneke way, but in a most tiresome unmoving manner, treading its way down the sunny slopes of Greece at a snail's pace, although it wants to mislead us into believing that what we're dealing here with is a thriller. The acting was so awful that I thought they had some b-series/ sitcom/ soap opera actors memorize some lines and deliver them in a very flat voice. As for the love making scene between the Albanian would-be hunk and the would-be steamy Greek woman (huh, forbidden love), I deem it less sexy than an Orthodox monastery dormitory. And despite the camera that was all-go (hand-held, because it's easier and cheaper than to use camera grip equipment), the story was so all-stand-still that I couldn't take it. Maybe some Western Europeans could find interesting this wanna be larger-than-life drama set in present day Greece, where the bad guy comes from Albania, living up to his stereotyped status, and the people on the bus are so afraid of him that they're a couple of beers short of joining him into a dance, accompanied by live guitar. You know, like we'd do in elementary school, till the driver'd shoot us off.

I recently saw this film at a festival of Greek culture in London and unfortunately it had quite the opposite effect that the event intended, presenting modern Greece as a divided wasteland in a way that Giannaris seems to enjoy.As you can tell I'm not a fan of this man's work. Although most of his films demonstrate competence they never rise above their petty desire to appeal to the international market that Giannaris so obviously craves. To make matters worse he has insisted on casting his 'From the Edge of the City' boy-toy Stathis Papadopoulos in his recent films. The boy cannot act, and has about as much menace as a slightly cheesed-off male model. I think cinema has had enough of 'non-professional' casts being used as a means of supposedly adding 'realism' to a film. Drama schools exist for a reason.Ultimately, this film is a great disappointment. Especially considering the potential of the storyline.