Bobby Paunescu

Set in Bucharest after the fall of Ceaușescu, Pioneers' Palace captures the chaotic essence of the time. Based on the director's own experience, the story follows a group of Romanian teenagers who, driven by the unprecedented freedoms of a free-market economy, open a disco in their high school. Surrounded by entrepreneurial opportunity and almost no limits, the teens visit Bucharest’s first-ever brothel and are exposed to the dark underbelly of an unregulated society when they are faced with potential exposure to AIDS.