Feature film "The Hare over the Abyss", 2006
1971. Chisinau, the capital of the Moldavian SSR, is in a state of flux—Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, is visiting the republic. Party officials are doing everything they can to please their leader, inventing entertaining events, even forcing local soccer players to learn hockey, a sport Brezhnev so fond of. But upon arriving in Chisinau, "our dear Leonid Ilyich" decides these events aren't quite to his liking and flies away in a hot air balloon. While the police and army search for the missing General Secretary, he lands near a remote village inhabited by a gypsy baron.
A Roma baron's daughter, Anna, and a local violinist, Lautar, a half-Roma, are in love, but the baron refuses to marry his daughter to some poor musician, especially one who's half-Romanian (even though he stole the General Secretary's limousine when Brezhnev first arrived in Moldova and presented it to his potential father-in-law as a wedding gift). The baron demands that Lautar come to court him no less than another Roma baron, of which there are only five in the USSR, including himself.
Brezhnev comes to the violinist's aid, coming to the baron as a matchmaker and promising that if the wedding doesn't take place, he will officially recognize the Roma as Romanians and also as the indigenous people of Siberia. Once the wedding is decided, the baron and his camp, in turn, help Leonid Ilyich realize his most cherished dream - a meeting and wedding with his beloved Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.