Before making her first feature film, Soldiers. Story from Ferentari, the Serbian director Ivana Mladenovic had already made several documentaries showing the reality of life in the slums of Rumania, but in this case what actually started out as a social portrait of a rundown area in Bucharest, was transformed into something quite different. “It’s not a story about the ghetto, and it‘s not about Gypsy musical culture either. In the end it’s a love story, and that’s the direction I wanted to take the film in” she explains. In the film, Adi, played by scriptwriter Adrian Schlop, based on autobiographical events, moves to Ferentari, to do some research on gypsy pop music in the neighbourhood, but ends up starting a romance with an ex-convict in what is the poorest district in Bucharest. The producer Ada Solomon acknowledged that the subjects that the film deals with such as homosexuality, poverty and marginalisation would probably cause a scandal in Rumania.