Greek Cypriot director and writer Anna Kannava died on Thursday from cancer, a year after she was diagnosed with the deadly disease.
Anna was born in Cyprus and migrated to Australia in 1974. Since then she was living in Melbourne. She directed several plays, short films and documentaries during her career and wrote two novels Stefanos of Limassol and So Much Joy – Lisboa.

In 2003she started filming her first feature film called Dreams for Life, which was released in Australia in 2005.

In Dreams for Life, Maria Mercedes played a 39 year old recluse, Ellen, who lived in Melbourne. A series of dreams prompted her to revisit her old neighbourhood where she met people from her past who managed to put Ellen onto a different life path.

Her second feature film Kissing Paris was released in 2008. It is a romantic story mainly filmed in Paris based in the story of an Australian woman who goes to Paris taking along love letters written to her mother by a mysterious lover when they too were in Paris in the 1960s.

She was suffering for years from the condition of scleroderma.