Adrian Schiop

36-year-old Stela has higher education but unable to keep a job. Since she was 12, she's been in love with a Serbian musician from the former Yugoslavia. One of the musician's alleged mistresses promises Stela that she will help her meet her idol.

Adi (40), a shy and introverted anthropologist who got recently dumped by his girlfriend, moves to Ferentari, most notorious outcasted neighborhood in Bucharest. He wants to write a study on manele music. The pop music of the Roma community serves as a way out for some, but mostly as one more means for the mafia pimps to make money off their acts and keep them in slave-like dependency. While researching his subject, Adi meets Alberto, a Roma ex-convict and a bear of a man, who promises Adi to help him. Soon, the unlikely pair begins a playful romance in which Adi feeds Alberto with improbable plans of escaping poverty and Alberto reciprocates with well-concocted phrases of love. Little by little their casual affair grows into love. And the funny and sweet teasing turns into something precarious, since Alberto is both dangerous and fragile and belongs to a world whose codes Adi doesn't understand.

It's based on the story of a crisis that took place in the summer of 2017 in the life of Mladenovic, a Serbian-born director living in Romania.