Olga

Olga is an eleven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy that lives in a village called Zagora in eastern Serbia. Her father Jakov and mother Mira desperately want to have a "healthy" child. They had three unsuccessful pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Jakov looks at the fact that he has that unfortunate child as a kind of punishment. His whole world, outlook on life, motivation, relationship with Mira, and Olga are colored by his feeling that he is being punished. Olga is a child that has no life outside of her room and a window beside her bed. Her only support in the household is her mother. The only contact with her peers and the outside world are Kruna and Nebojsa, children of her uncle Arsenije, a rich and a well-respected man, who owes a part of his wealth and influence to Olga's mother Mira, who has (in accordance with tradition) renounced her inheritance in favor of her brother. Arsenije is also an employer of his brother-in-law Jakov, who is struggling to provide a bare existence to his family. Olga's life, in this microcosm of rural life in eastern Serbia, is almost hopeless. Hidden from the outside world she is a prisoner of misfortune and shame that her household carries. Invisible to her father that want's a "healthy" offspring and (Mira) being torn about having Olga institutionalized, pressured to such an act by a local doctor Ljuba, Olga is being cared for by her feeble, tired, pregnant mother who is herself fighting with a multitude of disparate and contradictory feelings (towards Olga, towards Jakov, towards Arsenije). Then, when Nebojsa and Kruna discover, on the internet, videos of children with cerebral palsy swimming, there will emerge an almost impossible solution for Olga's isolation - going out of the house and to a nearby lake. Olga will herself start believing in the impossible, she will exit her home and learn how to swim the very morning when Jakov and Arseninje are in the hospital waiting for the news on Mira's difficult delivery. Shattered, having lost yet another child at birth, Jakov will experience a certain kind of revelation and he will head home determined to change his relationship with Olga. Nevertheless, at home he will be welcomed by a shocking surprise, and instead of in a bed he will find Olga with the rest of the kids at the lake. The revelation he had had at the hospital, the fear for a child which was clearly manifested for the first time beside Olga's empty bed, will culminate in the water, in a couple of panicked unsuccessful dives to find Olga and in the last scene in which the two of them, liberated in the glistening water, will "stand" in front of each other. AKA: Olga