By adopting the French language, Belarusian writer Aliona Gloukhova has found a way to write about her vanished father. Director Elitza Gueorguieva follows this process, which culminates in the publication of a book. At the same time, the lives of two women cross paths who ended up in Western Europe partly to gain distance from their home countries, Belarus and Bulgaria.

Using the coordinate system of a foreign language to express what would feel dramatic or pathetic otherwise: Aliona Gloukhova chose this method to write down the story of her father, a quiet dissident and Chernobyl expert who suddenly disappeared in the mid-1990s. The memories of him are sketchy, and perhaps even what masquerades as memory isn’t real. Aliona immerses herself in fiction and the French vocabulary that gives her the freedom to formulate her own version of what happened. Elitza Gueorguieva follows this cautious approach to the biographical-linguistic complex, which also appeals to her own memories. Because on the streets of Minsk, which she walks with Aliona, she immediately feels the familiar childhood fear. It overwhelms her like biting into a madeleine she had better not tasted.

A nostalgic trip into a past when buying a car constituted a lifetime’s work – especially for those Europeans who had a maximum of two handful of brands at their disposal. This cheerfully edited collection of auto biographies from socialist production evokes seemingly carefree times when the motorized vehicle was allowed to be simply a status symbol: free from ideological turf wars revolving around the climate crisis and mobility diets.

From Russia via Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to Germany and Norway, love stories between humans and Trabi, Moskvitch and Volga are captured on film. We meet protagonists who are fond of their beloved piece of tin, then or now, or have even amassed a considerable collection. There’s a couple who met and fell in love at a retro car exhibition and still drive the same model today. We meet a sexton who passes on his official car after 32 years of use. We make the acquaintance of a pin-up who always poses in front of vintage cars from the East. They all have a soft spot for these rickety rust buckets, because even though the products of the socialist car industry were usually slow, chunky, tedious to drive and to repair, they were all regarded as showpieces of a successful life. And there was one in almost every family: coveted, long longed-for, assiduously polished.