Ana Kokkinos’s film Head On is Greek myth transposed to a modern urban setting. The film’s protagonist, Ari, simultaneously evokes the spirit of the tortured, ecstatic dance of Zorba the Greek—an archetype whose earliest manifestation is the god Bacchus—and the myth of Persephone.

For this, her second film, Kokkinos has adapted Christos Tsiolkas’s 1995 novel Loaded for the screen. Loaded records twenty-four drug-hazy hours in the life of Ari, a young Greek man questioning his sexuality and ethnicity. From this material Kokkinos has fashioned an honest, brutal, authentic film. She uses the full resources of cinematic narrative—‘God’s point of view’ shots, voice-over, slow-motion, fast-motion, juxtaposing fantasy with reality, visual distortion—to create a picture of life so delicate in its perceptions, so musical in its squalid beauty, that we emerge from the theatre feeling dazed and disoriented. She has taken an outpouring of intense physical and spiritual anguish in the face of unremitting alienation and fashioned it into an intensely Baudelairian urban poem for this age of cinema.