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In anticipation of screening at Cannes’ MipTV market, Beta Film, which handles distribution, has provided Variety exclusive access to the international trailer for Greek abduction thriller “Silent Road.”

Written by Melina Tsampani and Petros Kalkovalis and directed by Vardis Marinakis, the series dissects the entangled lives of an affluent family in Athens after a school bus carrying their children is held hostage, the kids and bus drivers inside being abducted and held for ransom. A slight nod to the eerie legend, turning on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the town must come to grips with the event while police dig into the crime, desperate to resolve the atrocity.

“While shaping the idea for ‘Silent Road,’ we wanted to use a fairytale in the narration, as a bridge that connects the world of adults to that of the children. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a dark fairytale about trust and revenge.

Penelope and Dimitris are professional pet cremators. They roam the sprawling periphery of an industrial Greek town, retrieve defunct animals from their owners, burn them, and return their ashes. There’s a sense of urgency to their mission: kala azar, the infectious disease Janis Rafa’s singular debut feature is named after, is decimating hordes of canines all across Southern Europe, and the epidemic is threatening humans, too. But the couple’s pilgrimage also crackles with a certain compassion, an empathy that blurs their distance from the carcasses and complicates their role as undertakers. “You can include some of your pet’s favorite things,” Penelope tells a grieving woman before folding a handkerchief over her dead goldfish, rehearsing new condolences on her way to the next mourner: “We understand this must be a difficult time for you and your family…”

Truth be told, Rafa’s taciturn leads should only be...

Borne on the back of a juvenile performance of remarkable intelligence and spontaneity, Vardis Marinakis’ fine-boned “Zizotek” has an uncanny shimmer to its storytelling: It slips unnoticed from genre to genre like a quiet child moving between rooms trying not to disturb the adults. Starting out as a family drama of parental neglect and abandonment, it then becomes a woodsy survivalism tale and an odd-couple bonding narrative, before even those earthy elements fall away and we’re left with the delicate, skeleton-leaf framework of a myth, or a fairy tale — one of the dark kind that ends weirdly, rather than happily, ever after. Only the Greek director’s second feature, its effect is peculiar and moving and subtly bewitching, like a dream where you’re not sure at exactly which point you started dreaming.

A delicate balance between prosaic reality and the softer, subjective perception of a child is present from the outset,...

Greek period drama Little England was awarded three major prizes, including best film, at the Golden Goblet Awards of this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival (Siff, June 14-22).

The competition jury, headed by Gong Li, also gave the film the best director prize, which was accepted in person by Pantelis Voulgaris, and best actress for the performance of Pinelopi Tsilika, who also attended the awards ceremony.

The Jury Grand Prix went to The Uncle Victory, directed by China’s Zhang Meng, a film that was mired in controversy earlier in the week when it emerged that one of its stars, Huang Haibo, had been convicted for having sex with a prostitute. The film was not shown to press or public and questions about the lack of screenings were not answered at a Siff press conference.

The best actor prize went to Thailand’s Vithaya Pansringarm for his role in Tom Waller’s The Last Executioner, based...