"Fuck Sparta and the Spartans!", shouts a student from a Belgrade high- school after declaring his boredom during a history class. The young and passionate professor who was up to that point busy explaining Ancient Greece in an engaging way, remains speechless for a moment. Then in the next, he slaps the student. Everything is captured on a mobile phone camera by someone in class, sent to the media, and an over-sized and far-fetched scandal breaks out. Prime-time television shows debate "school violence" in light of the events – the student is pitied as the victim of a ruthless professor. Of course everything gets overly dramatized, and the professor gets suspended. Out of a job, he has to leave Belgrade and heads for Republica Srpska. And this is where the story begins. His new home is one of the bizarre outcomes of the Yugoslav wars from the 1990s. Though made up in its majority by Serbian ethnics, it is not part of Serbia, but of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Traces of the former military conflicts and bloody guerrilla war are still scattered everywhere here, and tensions between Bosnian Muslims and Serbian Christians did not disappear overnight, albeit no open disputes happen anymore. Once arrived here, the Serbian professor from Belgrade learns how different and personal history can get when you experiment it outside textbooks. He finds the individual stories of people who live here with the war still fresh in their memory. Stories about the power of unhealed wounds and about the desolation of a region where what was not destroyed by the war continues to be destroyed by poverty and a hopeless view of the future. Motel Nana is a moving account of life in former Yugoslavia, in a place largely deserted by people who fled either the war or the economical problems, and cannot make up their minds to ever come back.
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