When a mafia accountant is taken hostage on his beat, a police officer – wracked by guilt from a prior stint as a negotiator – must negotiate the standoff, even as his own family is held captive by the mob.

Inspired by the real-life story of a bus hijacking in Northern Greece, HOSTAGE explores the sensitive issue of Greek-Albanian relations through a young Albanian who takes over an intercity bus. Upon hijacking the bus, he takes the seven passengers hostage and demands a ransom of half and million euro, and safe passage to his homeland of Albania. Surrounded by police, the bus trundles towards the Albanian border and the tension mounts until the final harrowing conclusion.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Armenian minority in Nagorono-Karabakh attempted to break away from Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics. Overnight these former neighbors became enemies, and simple village folk were suddenly made hostages in a complex power game. One of the Azerbaijani villages right on the border is home to the family of the peasant farmer Kerim, who has just been captured by the Armenians. The village council decides to take an Armenian in order to arrange a hostage exchange. They imprison the wounded man in the barn next to Kerim's house, where his wife and three children desperately await the husband's return. The captive from the other side of the border finds himself in exactly the same situation - he, too, has three children, he finds it hard to scrape a living together, he has never done anything to harm anyone and, like Kerim, he just wants to go back home. But life in Karabakh is far more complex now. Blood calls for blood.