Lucia Klein Svoboda

Spring 1939. The bishop of Banska Bystrica learns that the Antichrist was born in the village of Piargy, which had been buried by an avalanche a few days earlier.

Martina is 18, loves dancing and goes by a nick name Shakira. Also, today she is leaving an orphanage...

This simple story is the feature debut for well-known Slovak theater and television director Juraj Nvota. Set in a Slovak village at the turn of the last century, the story teems with passion, and repressed and hidden emotion. It delves into the search for identity, investigating both love and hatred, while dramatizing the tragic relationship between an adolescent girl (Tatiana Pauhofová) and her ambitious father (Ondrej Vetchý). Set against the striking though simple backdrop of a picturesque, even idyllic, landscape - one ostensibly cut off from any important historical, political, or social context whatsoever - the arrival of an unwanted individual evokes the onset of a cruel drama.

Lovers & Murderers is about the ongoing war between those who have and those who want to have what the others have. The have-nots see themselves as poor victims trying to get for themselves what is justly theirs. But when the have-nots become haves, they continue to see themselves as victims of the hordes baying for what is justly theirs, and they have neither the energy nor the security to enjoy what they have obtained. The movie takes place in the microcosm of a small apartment building. The principal goal of the young people who share rooms in the building is to move into their own room and, some day, a real apartment. They scheme to get what they're after: form short-lived alliances, petition, frighten, marry, become pregnant, anything that might work. Lovers & Murderers presents Páral's vision of mankind caught in a cyclical process in which ideology pales before the pettiness, cruelty, and self-justification of human nature.

Anton is, or rather was, a famous theater actor, but cruel life began to put treacherous obstacles in his way. For example, a chair or a hole, which you idiots should try to overcome after fourteen beers. When the theater director fires him and his wife wants him out of the apartment, Anton takes fate into his own hands. And he starts drinking even more.