MORGEN

Forty-year-old Nelu lives with his wife live on a farmstead on the outskirts of Salonta, a small town on Romania’s border with Hungary. Nelu stopped tending the fields long ago, and can’t afford the repairs the roof so urgently requires. Bored with his job as a security guard in the local supermarket, he prefers to stack the shelves or give housewives tips on heating up tinned soup. One day is much like the other, but in the evenings he goes angling in the local rivers. One evening he “finds” a Turkish refugee by the waterside; Behran is stranded in Romania but wants to reach Germany via Hungary. Nelu takes him home, gives him food and clean clothes, and hides him in the basement. Though they have no common language, a wordless friendship develops between the two very different personalities. Nelu is eager to help the Turk but his attempts to smuggle Behran over the border keep failing. Will things work out next time? Winner of the special prize of the jury at Locarno in 2010, the feature debut of Marian Crisan, who comes from Salonta, is a quietly, sometimes dryly, humorous tale set on the fringes of Europe. A parable about politics and economics, about friendship and the insane yearning for a better life in the tomorrow.