It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.
A research-based essay film, but also a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states.
The plot of this film can be viewed from a two different levels. The first is universal and deals with the psychological theme of need for competition in the group, highlighting the need for the victory, which in life usually does not depend on the true virtues of the winner, so the result is usually tragicomic. The story talks about the choice of the most noble work. Selected participants arrive at the guesthouse on the border between Croatia and Serbia to prepare for the final act of the competition and the jury's decision. Seven competitors have a rather narrow view of the world. Even when the big events, such as ethnic conflicts in this part of the Balkans, the contestants insist to proceed the competition and to choose the hero of heroes, even though the very idea of competition has become anachronistic under the pressure of current events (the anger of the local Serbian population of the newly established Croatian authorities).
