This story centers around a phone call that was received one Friday in the spring of
1992. The main protagonist is an eleven year old girl. Being the only person at home,
she is the one to answer the phone. The call arrives from another state delivering news
of a death. It is this call that seemingly disintegrates the country and the girl’s entire reality. The war that will ravage the country has already started but the war is not the center of this story, only its backdrop. This call, which brought news of her grandfather’s death, remains as the most vivid memory in the girl’s mind decades later, as a constant presence.
The film thus proceeds as a creative investigation into remembrance and the creation
of personal and collective myths. The phone call as a recurring event in the story
brings together a series of recollections which are assembled to build a larger story.
Each memory is called forth by a phone call, and thus the film is divided into eleven
events, eleven phone calls. Each event begins with a phone ringing and ends with the
packing of suitcases and departure.

While the first call brings news of her grandfather’s death, the second call comes from
a mafia boss with the code name “Lajavi” or “ The One Who Barks” who wants extortion money and threatens the girl’s father. The family quickly takes the girl out of
school, bags packed and drives to Belgrade. At this point both of her parents carry
guns. The next call is in comparison mundane, and comes from Olja, a classmate from
school. She calls at an agreed time to listen to the girl play the piano. In this way she isable to drown out the noise of the outside world, in which dead cats hang on tree
branches and teenagers knife each other in the streets over sneakers. When the phone
rings again, this time it’s Siniša, the owner of the video club “Panda”. He’s asking for
the VHS tapes to be returned before he needs to administer a late fee. In her hurry to
obey, the girl accidentally returns her father’s porn tapes. Another segment takes us to
the neighbor’s house. Vlada is a prolific drug user and a skinhead, together they watch
MTV. Their fun is interrupted by a phone call from her mother, instructing her that the
time has come to pack.

Together the events all add to the larger story of departure, the reasons for which are
all outlined in the details and nuances of the segments. Finally, they coalesce to illustrate the heartbreak, dislocation and tearing as experienced by a young girl in crisis stricken Yugoslavia of the 1990s.