Life for a child in this small Hungarian village is one of simple pleasures - bike rides, play fights and hunting for gorillas. But everyone has to grow up sometime, and the nearly idyllic world of the children is shattered sooner than expected when Karcsi, their playmate, dies just before his tenth birthday.

Now it’s up to Karcsi’s faithful friends to tell his story - how he loved lions and elephants, how he used to deliberately pronounce words in a funny way and how he wanted to become a doctor and develop a medicine to cure all the illnesses in the world. Fantasy and reality are blended together in equal measures as the children’s words keep Karcsi’s memory alive. They talk of going with their friend to the International Space Station and taking a spaceship to Mars. And they tell us how one day he lost a tooth and the wound started to bleed and didn’t stop. This is a story of the loss of childhood – an affectionate yet unsentimental goodbye.

15-year-old Imane lives in "Les Boquets", a tower block in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, the place where the riots started in October 2005. She is often to be found kicking about with her friends on the football pitch in the middle of the housing estate, somewhere that sits right at the heart of the community. In the future Imane wants to become a police officer in order to challenge the commonly held belief that Arabs are always up to no good. In the meantime football is her outlet. "Without football I wouldn't be doing well", she explains, "When you're playing football you run around and can let off steam. I can't do that at home." On this estate it is hard to be a girl and to gain respect so Imane and her friend Sephora are proud to be considered 'garçons manqués' – tomboys. Playing football gives them recognition as well as a way to vent their aggression. That is until the disputes between the youth and the police are reignited, then Imane is once again aware of her identity and full of resentment: "They have weapons, we have stones!"

"Sibiu, Capitala Europeana" – Transylvanian Sibiu, one of the richest cities in Romania, has been chosen to be the European Capital of Culture 2007. The entire city has become a construction site. Everything must be gleaming, the EU-money is flowing. In the middle of all this is 70-year-old Ioan Drasovean, an old man trying to keep up with the drastic changes in his country. He lives in a small flat in a derelict house, a strong contrast to the magnificent renovations all over the city centre. We follow Ioan in his everyday life: at home or sitting on a bench in the park; in serious discussions with his friend Ilie or others; discussing Putin, Castro and mobile phone charges; and an old vacuum cleaner that needs to be fixed. "We are waiting for the EU." Was Samuel Beckett actually Romanian? This is a film about Romanian society, its problems and its hopes. And about how communism gave up because it was clever.