Reda, summoned to accompany his father on a pilgrimage to Mecca, complies reluctantly - as he preparing for his baccalaureat and, even more important, has a secret love relationship. The trip across Europe in a broken-down car is also the departure of his father: upon arrival in Mecca, both Reda and his father are not the characters they were at the start of the movie. Avoiding the hackneyed theme of the return to the homeland, the film uses the departure to renew a connection between two generation.
A new teacher - Marina - arrives in a small Pomak village in the late 1960s. She is a woman trying to live and think independently. Marina finds herself in a world unknown to her, at once pure and immaculate, but with the signs of the deformation of natural life that is typical of the whole country. After meeting the Doctor, Bai Mnogoznai, Mariana, the mayor, the internationalist Yosko, she discovers that each resists authority in their own way. And when the government starts changing the non-Bulgarian names of the Pomak villagers, the heroine realizes she is in a prison - with high mountains, forests, rivers - a prison of tragic beauty.
This is a sensitive film about human solidarity filled with humor and poetry; a bedridden man regales a child with a story about pirates while asking him to fetch some "pills".
The action takes place at the beginning of the 20th century in the provincial Bulgarian town, Turnovo. A rich young doctor suffers because of his love to his housemaid. Meanwhile the First World War is beginning.
The intricate relations between an Artist, an Actress and a Poet are seen against the background of one of the most dramatic events in the recent history of Bulgaria: uprising, which broke out in 1923.
The three grotesque novels whose action takes place at different times of the recent past are united by a common thematic key - their protest against violence and militarism, expressed by means of a kind of absurd humor.
