Liuben (2023)

Victor is in his early twenties, and has grown up in Malaga. For the summer holidays, he makes a trip that confronts him with his roots: an uninhabited town in the wound of the Balkans, Bulgaria. There he meets Liuben, a gypsy orphan teenager who makes a living, among other things, selling fruit by a ditch. What Liuben really wants is to open a hairdressing salon in Germany, and earn a lot of money for his girlfriend Ilyana, with whom he is expecting a child. He wants the family he never had, far from the orphanage, in a country full of possibilities. But Ilyana’s plan is to travel to Greece with a group of pregnant women who, like her, are going to give birth and sell their babies, to return later with the money. Victor strokes the scars on Liuben’s torso: some are signs of his mischievous childhood while others look more recent.