Adi (40), a shy and introverted anthropologist who got recently dumped by his girlfriend, moves to Ferentari, most notorious outcasted neighborhood in Bucharest. He wants to write a study on manele music. The pop music of the Roma community serves as a way out for some, but mostly as one more means for the mafia pimps to make money off their acts and keep them in slave-like dependency. While researching his subject, Adi meets Alberto, a Roma ex-convict and a bear of a man, who promises Adi to help him. Soon, the unlikely pair begins a playful romance in which Adi feeds Alberto with improbable plans of escaping poverty and Alberto reciprocates with well-concocted phrases of love. Little by little their casual affair grows into love. And the funny and sweet teasing turns into something precarious, since Alberto is both dangerous and fragile and belongs to a world whose codes Adi doesn't understand.

On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the aftermath, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz high school, where around a hundred people between unarmed protesters—mostly students—and independent reporters who documented the police brutality during the protests had took shelter. What happened next was called by Amnesty International "the most serious breach of civil liberties in a democratic Western country since World War II."