Scarred Hearts

Romania 1937. Emanuel, in his early 20s, suffers from bone tuberculosis and lives in a sanatorium on the Black Sea. He spends his time in a plaster bed and is pushed around by the staff. Surrounded by a medical apparatus with sometimes grotesque-looking equipment and enclosed in a body that is slowly decaying, Emanuel, like his mostly young fellow patients, is filled with an exuberant hunger for life. Physically immobilized, but all the more mentally agile, they engage in wide-awake intellectual and political discourse. He is less and less drawn to the outside world in Romania, where the country is increasingly developing into an ultranationalist society. And while the Second World War looms on the horizon, Emanuel falls in love.