After his mother's death, Sergej sets out on a journey to find a rare pear from her childhood and discovers a manuscript about the “Montemaggiore Pear Case”. Written by a Yugoslav agronomist Dr. Orel in the mid 1950s, the description of a fast-growing pear tree challenges all his presumptions about nature's ability to defy the passing of time. Sergej's research takes a thrilling turn when he receives a message from a Japanese plant neurobiologist, who happens to study the same rare pear variety. From deserted Mediterranean orchards through digressions into the murky chapters of recent history and international conspiracies, the journey leads Sergej back to the shadows and desires of his own imagination.
Tales of Fruit and Monsters will take an interrogative approach to our perception of the segment of the world which we call nature. It will examine human thirst and capacity to anticipate and dream and, beyond that, our need to adhere and control our environments and our stories. Based loosely on the theories of plant philosophy and ethnobotany, the film is inspired by the various extreme practices that man has developed around the cultivation of fruit, but also the strategies - with their many variations - that nature has deployed to apprehend man. On the threshold of these marvelous individual stories about fruit, there is a whole universe veiled and suspended in the wait for an arbor to blossom and the fruit to ripen. There are fantastical evocations of physical and mental landscapes created when there is no fruit. There is, in the background, the passage of time and the memories that, through the tree, seem to pass from one generation to another.