Georgi Bogdanov

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

Two friends from their student years are dating. One of them is the director of a peasant school, and the other is an impresario in show business. Memories bring them back to their youth. What have they lost and what have they kept over the years? These questions are answered by the heroes at dawn, after a stormy night.

The stories of three men get tangled up in the life of the young Gipsy called Magdalena - that of the Bulgarian Lilyanin, who starts off as a fighter for brotherhood but turns into a persecutor of the Gypsies; the story of the savage Halibryamov, who knows the language of animals, but does not speak any human tongue; the story of a rich Gypsy called Kanyo who wants but does not dare to break with the lot of his kin, and story of a Frenchman in a wheelchair who comes to realize that money cannot buy everything. Magic alone can unravel this knot of destinies... And then, there is the Gypsy tale of the black swallow and how it came to be.

Symbols of a bygone era, the cars produced by the state-owned factories of the Eastern Bloc are now highly prized by collectors. In the former German Democratic Republic, as in the other Eastern Bloc countries, the individual car was a grail, an almost unattainable commodity.

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

Two friends from their student years are dating. One of them is the director of a peasant school, and the other is an impresario in show business. Memories bring them back to their youth. What have they lost and what have they kept over the years? These questions are answered by the heroes at dawn, after a stormy night.

Symbols of a bygone era, the cars produced by the state-owned factories of the Eastern Bloc are now highly prized by collectors. In the former German Democratic Republic, as in the other Eastern Bloc countries, the individual car was a grail, an almost unattainable commodity.

Symbols of a bygone era, the cars produced by the state-owned factories of the Eastern Bloc are now highly prized by collectors. In the former German Democratic Republic, as in the other Eastern Bloc countries, the individual car was a grail, an almost unattainable commodity.