The story takes place in June 1991 in
Yugoslavia, only a few days before the outbreak of the
Yugoslav War. Ratko (
Srđan Todorović), a
Bosnian Serb, leaves
Belgrade prison and steals a red-coloured
Mercedes-Benz truck. The fact that he's (almost pathologically) passionate about stealing trucks and driving them while at the same time being
colour-blind brought him to prison in the first place. Suzana (
Aleksandra Balmazović), an urban Belgrade girl, discovers she is pregnant and wants to do an abortion. As her father, who believes that the emerging chaos won't last, uses their money for a speculative investment, she decides to go to
Dubrovnik to earn the money for abortion. After nearly running her over while she was hitch-hiking, Ratko decides to give her a lift. Despite the initial awkwardness and mistrust mostly due to fact that they come from different social background (Ratko coming from a rural countryside and Suzana coming from the big city), they eventually become fond of each other and fall in love. On their road through Yugoslavian countryside, they enter numerous, sometimes funny sometimes life-threatening, situations and encounter numerous people of virtually all ethnicities, soldiers of the
Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), smugglers, gunrunners, foreign
mercenaries, petty thieves, members of illegal local
militias, all of them just waiting for the war to break out. After witnessing that everything around them starts collapsing, they decide to change route to
Yugoslav-Italian border. Ratko learns that Švabo, one of his friends, has become a weapon smuggler. He decides to visit him to get two
passports and a load of weapons to bribe the local militias along their route. When they arrive at the border, they learn that the border cross was taken over by
Slovenian
Territorial Defense Forces and that
JNA is ordered to take it back. A tank appears and blows up Ratko's truck but the couple successfully crosses the border and settles in Italy. After some time, Suzana gives birth to a black boy and Ratko accepts him as his own son, claiming that the colors mean nothing to him. == Awards ==