Dawn breaks in Hungary, and a hard-working Romany family slowly begins their seemingly ordinary day: a mother who works as a cleaning lady, a studious daughter, and an inventive young son more interested in building a secret hideout than in schoolwork. These are not ordinary times, however: a death squad has been targeting their community, and as dawn fades to dusk this “ordinary” family may find such terrors even closer to home. Based on a terrifying real-life series of attacks in 2008 that left over fifteen Romany family homes firebombed, with fifty-five individuals injured and six dead, Bence Fliegauf's bone-chilling tale offers a harrowing, hour-by-hour commemoration of a daily life spent on society's margins, where modest pleasures and hard-won victories still survive under poverty and both petty and concrete racism. “I tried not to portray Romanies drumming on jugs, playing violins, dancing, (or other stereotypes),” noted director Fliegauf, who returned to Hungary after making the English-language sci-fi film Womb (2010), and who first came to attention with the award-winning Dealer (SFIFF 2005) and Milky Way (2007). The film's day-in-the-life structure, where every small moment counts, recalls the absorbing immediacy of recent works like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Gus Van Sant's Elephant, yet expands such aesthetics of realism into a riveting portrait of everyday Romany life, and a devastating critique of institutionalized bigotry and social inequality.