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.

How to stop the rain, whether god exists: these are among the profound questions that occupy the minds of Alexandru and Ocsy, two schizophrenic patients in the Calugareni Neuropsychiatric Centre in Romania. Throughout the film, the two friends discuss such scientific and philosophical matters as we observe them and their fellow patients going about their strange daily routines, while the centre's nurses are kept out of view. One man happily moves pebbles from left to right, from right to left, day in day out. Another patient lying in his bed stares at colourful projections on the wall, and another spends his time diligently caring for others less physically able than himself. In precisely composed images, accompanied by light piano music and evocative atmospheric sound, the director registers the tiny details of the environment in the institution. A harsh world, far removed from normality, is transformed into the sublime.