Hetty Krapels

In July 1992, fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia, some patients of the Bosnian mental institution in Jakes leave for Hungary. Since 1996, these patients are housed on a ward of a refugee centre in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, where the rooms are clean but bare. The filmmakers talk to patients, who would rather go back home. They interview the psychiatrist in attendance, who wonders why there is no place in Bosnia for this small group. In Bosnia, they interview the psychiatrist of their former institution; old video footage shows the ravages of war. Plaintive singing on the soundtrack accompanies a trip across snow-clad Bosnia, where the filmmakers visit the patients' relatives. Their reactions are similar each time: they did not know that the patients were in Hungary now, but Bosnia has a lack of money, doctors and medicine. According to their relatives - and the director of a new institution in Jakes - they are better off in Hungary.

For all Frits, a farmer's son, knows, his mother died when giving birth to him. He and his father make up a strong team. In the literal and figurative sense, because his father not only teaches him to milk the cows and hunt, he is also the coach of his soccer team. The happy tide turns when the boy turns eighteen and is scouted as a promising soccer talent. Suddenly, Frits's future is no longer with his father on the farm, but on the green grass of the Nijmegen soccer club NEC. His son's splendid soccer career may be the crowning glory of the farmer's hard work, but he is afraid he will also lose his only child. Desperate, he reveals the lie with which he raised his son. Frits is bewildered and makes a dramatic decision.

A moving documentary. The life stories told by immigrants in Paris are often saddening. The hardships they went through and their current uncertainty and difficult situation. No residence permit, fear of the gendarmerie, little money, poor housing. The quality and background of the musicians is many times amazing.