1981, Vienna. Perla has rebuilt her life with her daughter, Julia, a gifted young pianist. Living in exile, she has tried to leave behind the traumas of her youth in communist Czechoslovakia. But when Julia’s father, Andrej, contacts her unexpectedly to say he is gravely ill, Perla risks crossing the border back into her homeland. Pulled between past and present, she begins to make reckless choices that jeopardise her freedom and strain her relationship with Julia.
“For as long as I can remember, we would talk about hunger. Having to flee, being expelled or imprisoned; these things are deep inside me. The fear of something similar happening to me is always there, no matter how unlikely it is. I am sure those fears and modes of behaviour were passed on to us. That's why I see the roots of Perla's story in my own family. I dedicated Perla to my grandmother, whose immense passion for life and bold choices inspired the journey of my heroine.” (Alexandra Makarová)
Alexandra Makarová
Born in 1985 in Košice, Slovakia. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Makarová moved to Vienna to live with her painter mother, and studied screenwriting and directing at the Film College Vienna. Crush My Heart, her film about Slovakian Roma begging in Vienna, was her feature directorial debut.