Ivan Barnev

A busboy with an inferiority complex and a driving ambition to become a millionaire quickly rises to become a head waiter, but the respect he craves continues to allude him. When he marries a Nazi gym teacher, the Czechs despise him even more, while the Germans barely tolerate him. Rare stamps taken from wealthy Jews make his dream come true after the war, but his first-class hotel is soon nationalized by the Communists and he ends his life in poverty and isolation.

Nadezhda is a high school English teacher near Sofia who also works as a translator to earn extra cash. Stunned by a theft reported by one of her students she is determined to find the culprit and punish him. As events unravel at work, her personal life changes drastically. A bailiff notifies her that the bank is about to seize her house and put it up for auction because of unpaid mortgage payments. Determined to keep her house, she will do everything she can to get the money before it is too late. Her personal and professional life will converge as she wonders, while exhausting all possible options, whether to question the principles she teaches her students.

Lacking support from her unstable mother, a bullied teen’s doting grandfather enrolls her in a judo school, where she learns how to fight within.