If the Seed Doesn’t Die

Romania about 200 years ago. Peasants drag a wooden church across a frozen lake to their village. They’re not allowed to build one, because they are Orthodox Christians. The Balkan region in the post-communist era. A Serbian man is looking for the body of his son, who died in a car crash in Romania. A Romanian man wants to find his daughter, who was forced to work in a brothel in Kosovo. They meet by the illegal border crossing on the River Danube.
What follows is a depressing, black tragicomedy in which there is plenty of drinking and prostitution, corpses are sold for a thousand euros and corruption flourishes. All against the background of the turbulent political history of the Balkans with continually fragmented nation-states and a Babylonian mix of languages.
That the region has always been the site of fierce and often bloody conflicts is made clear by Sinisa Dragin (Tiger Award winner in 2002 with Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth) in this incomparable succession of absurd dramatic situations.

• 

• 

•