MOTEL NANA

Ivan teaches history to higher elementary classes in a Belgrade school. He is a bachelor, in love with ancient Sparta. With no friends, the only people he converses with are the math teacher, a fervent sports’ bettor, and a female lecturer in love with him and desirous of having his child. In his class that bears no similarities with the heroic ways of old Spartans, Ivan is provoked by a student and ends up slapping him on the face. In a Serbia in the heat of transitional changes, where sincere outpours of emotions are severely sanctioned, Ivan’s presence in school is no longer welcomed. The school board suspends him by decisive vote of the female teacher but, with the headmaster’s help, he finds a temporary job opportunity in a demolished, war-scarred mountain village in the Banja Luka region of Republika Srpska in Bosnia. On his way there, he meets Yasmina, a young woman with an obscure past, back from Germany to her homeland after being invited by an old friend – Hazim - who now runs a motel. Her name – Yasmina, which conceals her ethnic background, helped her pull through the war and survive the history that Ivan teaches in school. Will his sojourn in Bosnia and assignment to a school with just eight students of various ages, in a remote rural surrounding that has nothing in common with city life, where a flap to a kid’s cheek is a mere method of education rather than a violation of children’s rights, help Ivan at least partially understand life? His love for Yasmina, who’s been lured into marriage by the much older Hazim, and Hazim’s son Senad, the only Muslim child in the class whom Hazim banishes from attending lessons by a Serbian teacher, will make Ivan understand the insignificance of history, which only perpetuates itself and brings no benefit to mankind. A lone kiss in a stormy night, in a village still lying in ruins, ten years after the end of the war, amidst unhealed frictions of old, and yet another slap on the face of a local student, will bring Yasmina and Ivan closer together in a joint escape from reality and to a ride on a dusty bus, where neither one of them want to seat next to the window…