Set in a fictional New York in the late 1970s, this cult film is both time- and place-specific as well as “outside of time”; both classical and contemporary; a movie and a staged play. The story is an adaptation of Xenophon’s Anabasis in which a group of gang members heroically navigate their way home—on foot, in cars, on the subway—through a hostile city full of rival gangs. Director Walter Hill writes: I liked the idea of telling a story based on Greek history. Specifically, Anabasis relocated to a futuristic, sci-fi setting… When you create science fiction there is often the temptation to render it completely abstract. I thought that the challenge would be to make it simultaneously realist and fantastic; I wanted to combine these two elements in order to turn it into a dark comic book.” Event Url