After around a decade and a half in prison, Giorgos is released. He has no one - apart from a son he hasn't heard from for ages and now wants to look for. He meets Strella, a transsexual nightclub chanteuse, in a flophouse. Strella has gathered a poor crowd of outcasts around her, including a drag queen with cancer; she also soon adopts the powerfully well-built Giorgos - love is in the air. The young couple could now indulge in their love - but there is still the prodigal son ...
Panos Koutras' aesthetic is, to put it mildly, very much his own: the camp-inspired high modernism of the 60s and 70s (Werner Schroeter, Kuchar Brothers ...) is amusingly short-circuited with the trash-driven vulgar postmodernism of the 80s (Lloyd Kaufman, Randal Kleiser, the Dark Brothers ...), which is somewhat reminiscent of early Almodòvar, but much more gaudy, rough and dirty. With Strella, this film adaptation of a Greek myth that Pier Paolo Pasolini had already successfully tried his hand at, Koutras' cinema opened up a new dimension: while his first works, such as his feature film debut The Attack of the Giant Moussaka (1999), were primarily bizarre, this one is genuinely touching and emotionally powerful. One of the great revelations of recent years.
