Lidija Stevanović
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.
Five scenarios in which people have trouble distinguishing truth from illusions. Each segment reflects the motto of Voltaire's Candide: "Optimism is insisting everything is good, when everything is bad."
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.
A transvestite couple from 1990s Belgrade beholds their profession as a pacifistic mission, curbing the urges of rapists, gamblers and horny young men during turbulent periods in war-torn country.
A moulder wants to live a happy life, but the circumstances in his factory are such that everyone is looking for an opportunity to grab the money before the ship sinks down to the bottom.
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.
The abolishment of a railway station in a remote Bosnian village affects the lives of the local railwaymen.
