CLOISTERED SISTER

SYNOPSIS

If you want something badly enough, will the universe meet you halfway?

Stela falls in love with a Balkan musician after seeing him on television. Determined to meet him, she accepts the help of Vera, a successful starlet rumoured to be his lover.

Their worlds collide when Vera promises to rescue her from poverty by taking her to Bucharest, where she runs an erotic-products business.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTE

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The Cloistered Sister is based on real people and explores the relationship between reality and dreams. Although its starting point is a tragedy—the untimely death of a singer and friend—the film is above all an empathetic parody of romantic melodramas.

Set on the fringes of the Balkans at the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis, the film asks how much room magic and fiction can still occupy in a world so extreme and constantly changing. It plays with this ambiguity, suggesting that there may be no place for magic in such a reality. The only way to keep dreaming without being cast out of the world is to carry on, even while knowing that one is living under an illusion.

The Cloistered Sister is also a bittersweet comedy of manners, portraying people’s beliefs and prejudices about sex in a country on the margins of the European Union. The film explores the relationship between sex and money—or rather: can sex replace money? Can it appease hunger or stop inflation?