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."