While working in Europe, Avram comes to realize that Italians are paying good money for trained dogs that can protect them from the waves of immigrants. That's Avram's big-time idea: he returns to Romania to start breeding watch dogs which he can later export to Italy. As it happens, he settles next to a camp of immigrants recently sent back from Rome. Thus, the Italian tension is willy-nilly reenacted on the banks of the Danube. Avram's life gets complicated. He starts having an affair with his own daughter in law, lands in conflict with his ex-immigrant neighbors and his life is literally under threat. The film ends with an unpredictable situation.
Acting
Toma Cuzin weaponizes pathetic desperation into something genuinely unnerving.
Direction
Daneliuc's deadpan staging of grotesque scenarios.
Director
Mircea Daneliuc
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Romania's 2000s cinematic wave examining post-communist moral collapse, often called 'Romanian New Wave's ugly cousin' for its lack of redemption.
Shot on location near real Danube border camps; some 'extras' were actual recently-deported immigrants, raising documentary ethics questions Daneliuc refused to answer.
RO
