GASTARBEITER STORIES

Darko Markov is a Viennese taxi driver who gets additional inspiration for his novel about the hard life of Balkan gastarbeiters (lit. "guest workers", German word for immigrant labourers, also adopted by Balkan people) while driving around streets of Vienna. After the good reception of the novel and monodrama (which Darko based on the novel, and performs it himself), our protagonist decides to take a step further and turn his gastarbeiter experience into a theatre play. He opts to give the roles to authentic persons, those he had already written about in the novel, and who will actually play themselves. Darko and his friends want to overcome the hardness of life in a foreign country through artistic action, finding a shelter from the cruel reality. The painstaking casting process is followed by even more painstaking rehearsals. Parallel to the segments from rehearsals for the play and Darko's monodrama that he keeps performing at Viennese and Serbian venues, we follow authentic, bitterly humorous scenes from the lives of the protagonists, the Viennese gastarbeiters. Our main characters are people of various nations from the Balkans who have once again been inclined to turn to each other, under the pressure of living abroad. A film about people who live tragically torn between their homes and Vienna, unable to find peace, those who are foreigners abroad, but who are also gradually becoming strangers at home.