Ministarstvo boli

The young literary scholar Tanja Lucić has to leave her hometown of Zagreb due to the war and ends up at the University of Amsterdam as an Associate Professor of Serbo-Croatian literature. Her students aren’t much younger than her, and all of them come from different parts of former Yugoslavia. They enrolled at the university to receive residence permits. In their free time, they earn their money as street musicians, waiters and cleaners, or by working for an ancillary company of the S&M chain shop “Ministarstvo boli”. Tanja decides to attempt the “Yugo-nostalgic” experiment of “cataloguing” ex-Yugoslavian everyday life.