Born without a navel and unwanted by her mother Boyrana (Irmena Chichikova, I AM YOU) who imagines a better life in the West, Viktoria (Daria Vitkova, and later Kalina Vitkova) finds wide acceptance at the height of Bulgaria's communist regime as the "Socialist Baby of the Decade" (her birth defect signifying a lack of connection to the past and a possible evolutionary advancement). Describing her indifferent mother and doting father (Dimo Dimov) as "those people" to her godfather president Todor Zhivkov (Georgi Spasov) - to whom she has a twenty-four hour direct line in her bedroom - Viktoria grows up amidst heaps of unearned praise as she dominates her schoolmates, picks on crippled Stefcho (Simeon Tsolov and later Ivo Karamanski) who was born the same day as herself and held up as an example of how socialism is just to all, or accompanies the state children's choir by banging on random notes on a piano. At the end of her first decade, democracy takes over and Viktoria is in for a rude awakening (with the discovery of sexual difference supplanted by her discovery of belly-buttons). Instead of a comeuppance from those she tormented, she is simply forgotten, cutting the cord with Zhivkov and feeling her mother's lack of love for her more than ever. "Reborn" in some ways after falling from a tree while showboating for her schoolmates, Viktoria learns to live without her mother's affection while trying to understand her by forming a loving relationship with her grandmother (Mariana Krumova), a woman incapable of mothering from Boryana's perspective, and attempting to gain her own foothold in the world.