Synopsis:
Altinaï flies to Montenegro with a mission: to deliver to the Cetinje Museum the heavy suitcases of her grandfather, the last king in exile, and to organize the first family Slava in a hundred years. These trunks are overflowing with relics — fragments of an identity puzzle where intimate memory and Great History intertwine. But before she can drop them off, she must first collect, scattered all over the country, the missing pieces: a portrait of Njegoš from her cousins in Njeguši, a handwrit-ten letter from Prince Mirko locked in a bank in Budva, the icon of Saint George from her father in Podgorica, and other treasures dispersed along the way. Her journey turns into a burlesque escapade: a monumental hangover and forgotten luggage at her cousins’ place, a breakdown in the middle of nowhere that forces her to hitchhike, a car accident that compels her to call Rambo Amadeus for help, and — worst of all — the loss of a dynastic jew-el. Meanwhile, a journalist from Point de Vue – Images du Monde relentlessly hounds her. What to do with the weight of such a genealogy? But the greatest pressure is still the organization of the Slava. Assisted by a phlegmatic collaborator, Altinaï must convince Prince Albert of Monaco, a few European royal cousins… and even Sté-phane Bern to attend this historic event, which — tradition obliges — will welcome friends and family of every stripe, regardless of social standing. Along battered roads and through family archives, between flashbacks and ghosts of the past, Altinaï slowly stitches back together the thread of her own identity. She relives the moment when, at twelve, she discovered she was a princess of Montenegro, and plunges again into History to better understand where she comes from. Between black humor, Balkan absurdities, and an intimate quest, this tragicomic road movie braids together family memory and the grand sweep of Balkan history.