Dražen Pavlović

Jovana works behind the counter at a bakery in the small town where she lives with her father. Her somewhat shy peer Marko is supposed to follow in his own father’s footsteps and become a truck driver. But the events of one night change both their lives… Serbian director Stefan Malešević debuts with a formally distinctive triptych whose loose narrative structure challenges the viewer to actively participate in putting together the pieces of the mosaic.

A police officer Hamza has to work that night even though his wife has gone into labour, because the police are short-staffed. To make everything worse, it seems that people showing up at the station have decided to prove the old belief about the mysterious powers of the full moon and its influence on human behaviour. In the course of that one night, representatives of all the absurdity and tragedy of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina parade through the station and somehow help Hamza get ready for a new life.

Our story takes place at the end of the 1960s. This is the time of the collapse of the ideals of a more just and honorable life brought into prominence by students worldwide in the great rebellion in 1968 and of the beginning of the end of an equally grand illusion called Yugoslavia. Andjelko is the principal of a middle school in a small Bosnian place Dubica. He believes in Yugoslavia and worships its leader Josip Broz Tito. Andjelko, however, has one serious fault: he is a forger, he makes forged school diplomas. He does not do this out of self-interest, but because he is a staunch philanthropist. One day, a neighbor for whom Andjelko forged the leather-working school diploma, in order to take revenge on the local veterinarian, reports to the police that this one too has Andjelko's diploma. Our hero is, therefore, forced to flee to the big city. He lives there illegally, at the harborers of outlaws for whom he once forged diplomas. But one day, Andjelko runs into his schoolmate...