VESPA

Berekhát, a small village in southern Hungary. A summer idyll. The men are rabbit hunting, the children are playing games of their own. With cards and chocolate. Little Lali wins a voucher for a Vespa scooter, to be collected in Budapest, the city where the father he has never met is supposed to work. So what is he waiting for? A road trip awaits that keeps its suspense right until the very end; that what makes a boy happy isn't so simple after all. The train suddenly grounds to a halt, so he marches across the fields, flags down a car, gets his first glimpse of the Danube and then Budapest, the urban canyons, the hostile figures. Maybe life in the village wasn't easy but in Budapest it's war; of the normal, everyday variety. Uniformed security personnel, businessmen in containers working criminal dealings into scraps of paper, rabbit lovers with rabbit fur allergies, coeval youths who treat the provincial gypsy kid like a shooting gallery target; every man is enemy to every man. Lali refuses to give up just yet however and proceeds to ask complete strangers to masquerade as his father so that he might at least return home with the Vespa, the wasp. It turns out to survive in a criminal society one has to live as a criminal, so he steels the Vespa and causes a magnificent accident. He survives, there's no happy end however. Just like in real life.