It’s Hungary in the early 1990s and Ákos, Petya and Laci, too, are young and need the money. The Iron Curtain has fallen, Europe lies at the friends’ feet, but train tickets to Stockholm, Paris, Berlin or Madrid are almost unaffordable for ordinary people. Far from losing courage, the three develop a clever method to enjoy the new freedom to travel: They forge the official tickets, still handwritten on carbon copy forms, bleaching the carbon ink out with sanitiser, ironing the paper smooth and dry, getting some stamps, researching the operating procedures of the national railway, studying timetables, prices and routes and filling in the boxes on the forms again. And off they go. But that is not the end of the story. A feeling of blind infatuation sets a business idea in motion. How about making these very special tickets available to others in need? One becomes ten, 150 soon become 1,000 – until a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities begins.
László Csáki’s scintillating gangster comedy is loaded with contemporary history. His excellent montage of drawn fiction, authentic film documents and memoirs broadens our view of the suspended years of social upheaval in his Hungarian homeland.