Prize-winning and praised, this extremely calm and occasionally dry, cool yet irresistible story about the boundary between maintaining the law and a sense of justice. A young Romanian policeman wonders whether it's a good idea to put school children in jail just because they smoke marijuana.
Cristi, a young cop, has for some time been following a schoolboy who is suspected of drug smuggling, based on a tip by an informer. Cristi's superiors demand that the schoolboy is arrested, even though the investigations have not yielded any valuable information. 'If anyone has anything to do with drugs, then it is my informer,' Cristi complains. In addition, why does he have to rob every Romanian adolescent of his freedom and future when, in the Czech Republic and the rest of Europe you can smoke hash wherever you like? But the bosses won't budge: the law is the law and Cristi is a policeman - isn't he? In simple scenes, Corneliu Porumboiu reveals the complex moral dimensions of an average police investigation. The calmness and attention for detail with which Porumboiu shows Cristi’s investigation underline the futility of his actions.