DOMESTIC

An apartment building in Romania. The colourful array of tenants includes characters like Mihaes, a full-blooded pasha and armchair philosopher who believes Jesus was Romanian, and by rights Romania should get Israel’s tourists. Or debt-plagued Toni, always dressed in tracksuit bottoms, who abducts pets then returns them to the grateful owners, pocketing the finder’s reward. Or the melancholy schoolteacher Mr. Lazar, who also works as the caretaker and finds himself trapped between the warring factions as he struggles to keep all the residents happy. But the lead roles in this wonderfully surreal, yet often painfully realistic, comedy are actually played by the building’s menagerie of dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits and pigeons. These cossetted animals are objects of love and hate (and sources, in some cases, of food) providing fixed coordinates in an unstable social microcosm radically shaken up by the death of a young girl. DOMESTIC is a wise film full of absurd dialogues and situations in which a thin line separates life from death.