In Žilnik’s hilarious and sneakily charming docu-fiction, post-socialist restitution returns his childhood home to Serbian jazz musician Stevan. After six decades in Germany, he returns to his homeland where a series of reunions sheds light on his life.
Liza is a young Dutch woman who travels to Venice to meet her Italian father Mauro. Mauro has not seen Liza since she was three years old, when he and Liza’s mother decided to split up. Mauro has traveled the world since as a musician. When Liza is in Venice it turns out there is more in store than just a couple of days in Venice. He takes Liza on a musical voyage along the route of the Orient Express. A trip that will eventually take them to Istanbul.
The film consists of five stories that are interconnected with mysterious characters and events. The main character is trying to discover the meaning of each. He gets sucked in the events that will lead him to the strange places where he meets strange people, fairytale creatures and landscapes.
The story of the film is set in the period from the 1940s until today in the Pannonian plain (the plain in the Central Europe), in an area of elusive boundaries, mysterious and unstable spiritual identity. The witness of the time is a Jewish boy Benya Cohn who, with his eye wide open, remembers the tragedy of his family, in the shadow of the Holocaust, concentration camps and new wars.
Young seamstress Ivana leaves work in the tailor shops in Novi Pazar and accepts an offer to be a waitress in a private cafe in Gusinje, Montenegrin town on the Yugoslav-Albanian border. She meets a waitress with whom she becomes fast friends. Brothers Skeljzen and Becir come to Gusinje from New York for the holidays and meet with the waitresses, starting a love affair. Young men promise the girls marriage and going to America.
Zilnik's 102 minutes long TV series is about a couple of guys, one good and naive, the other liar and manipulator, trying to make a living the best they can...Along the way they meet a guy who eats glass, metal and plates, then a couple of strippers, and a lot of ordinary people. Zilnik's dry realistic approach is filled with humour and documentary parts with some real peasants and working-class people.
The abolishment of a railway station in a remote Bosnian village affects the lives of the local railwaymen.