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A woman bakes a cake with a gun inside, and then searches frantically for some place to take it. Two teenagers roam across a barren moonscape, which turns out to be a suburban highway in the making. Surreal home movies are early pointers to director Anna Kannava's feelings of alienation within a family which had torn itself away from Cyprus to start a new life in Australia, having already been torn apart by the departure of Anna's father. Like the old Greek movies Anna watched as a child at the Astor, where her mother worked, her life and that of her brother's was filled with fantasy and melodrama - role playing was preferable to real life in suburbia.
In The Butler Anna Kannava celebrates her family's idiosyncrasies with great originality and sensitivity. We learn that even as adults, Anna and her brother Nino have found roles which help them live with dignity and humour: "The Butler is about a battler, my brother Nino. Nino and I have always been close. As unemployed teenagers we visited the employment office together hoping to get a iob. Around this time, Nino started dreaming of a solution to our employment situation. I was to become famous and therefore rich, and he would become my butler."