Jacqueline Lentzou's second feature, A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and now screens at the 64th New York Film Festival. The critic writing for The Film Stage named it a Critic's Pick and called it "bold, staggeringly inventive" — a coming-of-age film that strips away the genre's conventions to become something stranger and harder to classify.

On its surface, the story is simple. Jo, a wayward 15-year-old played by Evita Andriopoulou, has her world upended the morning she hears a classmate sing. The film follows the rapport that develops between the two girls over the course of a single day, culminating in what the review describes as a devastating climax. But Lentzou is not beholden to narrative or chronology. Her film works not through scenes but "shards of them," obfuscating the viewer's sense of time so thoroughly that it becomes difficult to tell when the action takes place.

The film opens inside a dream. Jo naps on a lawn, sunlight on her face, and Lentzou beckons the audience into her head: invisible entities, whose voices appear only as subtitles, summon objects from the dark recesses of her subconscious — a shell, a winged hat, a bullet. It is the first of several surreal sequences, and even after Jo wakes, the film remains in what the reviewer calls "a kind of somnambulist trance."

Cinematographer Grimm Vandekerckhove, known for his collaborations with Bas Devos on films including Here (2023), converts the film's unassuming settings into what the review calls "a wellspring of wonders." Jo's turf is an anonymous stretch of suburbia with manicured gardens and station wagons; her high school is so nondescript it could sit anywhere in continental Europe. Vandekerckhove complicates these mundane backdrops throughout, using mirrors and reflecting surfaces to dizzying effect — faces distort, objects become optical illusions, and early on a light fixture reflected in a window seems to float against a cloudless sky.

The review pushes back on the reflex to file the film under the Greek New Wave. Yes, Phaedra is weird — but its oddness differs markedly from the work of Yorgos Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and it carries none of that movement's cynicism. Instead, the reviewer writes, the film's strangeness is inseparable from its empathy: "Lentzou's sophomore communicates a contagious affection for its protagonist."

That affection likely stems from the true-life tragedy behind the film: the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a teenager shot dead by police in Athens in 2008, a killing that triggered riots across Greece. Lentzou, the review notes, is not interested in rekindling old polemics. What powers the film is not anger but "an unarticulated longing" — felt in the silence that seizes the school corridors, in the amber glow of Vandekerckhove's palette, and in Andriopoulou's face.

The pivotal scene arrives in music class. Accompanied by their teacher at the piano, students sing before their peers, and when bookish Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou) begins crooning the old ballad "The Rose Tattoo," tears come to Jo's cheeks. Phaedra's voice hits her "with the unbridled force of a revelation," though Lentzou's script never spells things out. The two meet again at recess, tiptoe around each other, trade music recommendations, and decide to go to the movies that evening. That, in a nutshell, is the entire plot.

The review declines to spoil the third act's foray into the otherworldly, noting only that the visually bold segment is "the natural culmination of a journey designed to familiarize your senses to the mysteries lurking everywhere around you." Straddling the real and the supernatural, Lentzou's film probes the divide between life and death — and cinema's capacity to bridge the gulf separating them. It is, the review concludes, a measure of the director's artistry that her discombobulating film "teaches you how to see them."