OCCIDENT

“Say, did you expect the year 2000 to look like this?” wonders a walking beer bottle that is actually a man named Luci. Back in Soviet-era Romania he was a botany student and would-be defector from the Eastern Bloc. Now Luci is near destitute and, in the free market economy, reduced to a humiliating job in “advertising” he must wander around in public dressed as an alcoholic beverage. Having hit rock bottom, Luci seems to lose his beloved Sorina to a Belgian headed out of the country. Or does he? Following the disastrous collapse of her wedding ceremony, Michaela, an aspiring poet (whose destiny seems strangely intertwined with Luci's) pins her hopes for personal and professional fulfillment on a successful foreign suitor, arranged by her parents through an international matchmaking service. But Michaela's dreams also fail to work out as planned. Don't necessarily believe what you think you see in this marvelous, bittersweet little gem. In three variations on three sets of characters, we watch the changing fortunes of two generations of restless Eastern Europeans for whom life in their homeland seems to hold little promise. But even as they turn their faces to the prosperous nations of the west and immigration, their post-socialist existence is still capable of surprising them and us with sudden whiplash twists of fate and ironic reversals. (In Romanian, French and Italian with English subtitles)