Film: Hostage, by Constantine Giannaris

One morning, a young man boards an intercity bus on its daily route to Thessaloniki in northern Greece. He hijacks the bus at gunpoint and takes seven of the passengers hostage. In his left hand he holds a grenade. He turns out to be a 25-year-old Albanian immigrant by the name of Elion Senia. His central demands include a ransom of 50 million Greek drachmas and safe passage back to his homeland. The hijacking is transmitted live on national television. For the next twenty hours, a wild and at times bleakly comic chase ensues through northern Greece, with the hijacked bus at the head of a convoy of police cars, television crews, desperate relatives, and bystanders… all the while heading towards the Albanian border… View film series.

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