Srdjan Todorovic as Milos.
Bosnian Muslims were widely publicized. Similarly, the 1999 NATO bombing further devas- tated a country already impoverished by years of economic sanctions and other forms of foreign and domestic destruction. Sentiments of injustice and abandonment, and motifs of orphans or absent parents, scar
not just A Serbian Film but an entire wave of recent movies from the country. Collective memories of these atrocities are at the root of Tears for Sale (p.21), Uros Stojanovic’s grim fantasy about survival in necrophilic times; Who the F**k is Milos Brankovic, a strange, overtly nationalistic thriller about the downfall of “Serbian values” by means of international Gay-Jew-Atheist-NGO conspiracy(!); Mladen Djordjevic’s Made in Serbia, a semi-documen- tary about the grotesquely pitiful Serbian porn “industry”; plus his blackly comedic, bloody, sexually explicit road movie The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (p.19), which is also cur- rently on the festival circuit. The harshest of the bunch – a movie based on images of pornog- raphy, rape, butchery and disembowelment – could not have been titled anything else but A Serbian Film. (This summer it headlined the Subversive Serbia program featured at Mon- treal’s FanTasia film festival – co-curated by the writer of this article). Rather than being a piece of auto-racism, however, it seems to be playing upon the ex-
pectations (and prejudices) associated with how this locale is perceived among both the Serbs and in the West, and can be understood as a certain grotesque parody of Serbia’s current image as “monster” in the eyes of foreigners. As such, it inevitably implicates the viewers and the preconceptions they bring with them. In A Serbian Film no one is innocent: not women, not children, not grannies, and especially not the audience. Spasojevic speaks to Rue Morgue from Serbia, to help us understand one of the most ni- hilistic cinematic experiences ever conceived.
One American critic called A Serbian Film “one of the angriest films I’ve ever seen.” What is the root of that rage? My approach to moviemaking is honest, emotional and in- stinctive. I don’t feel at ease with theory, and cannot analyze a work in progress as a finished thing – I merely follow my instinct and the idea I believe in. That’s why sometimes I’m surprised by the complex analyses and reviews that other people write about the film I’ve made. In their layered read- ings I encounter things I never consciously contemplated, yet they’re evidently there. However, I’m sorry to say that something like A Serbian Filmplaces one in a position to ex- plain things dealing with emotions, instincts and other stuff that should be left to the experience and feeling of the audi- ence and to the judgments of the critics – whatever they be, positive or negative. Having all that in mind, I suppose that the anger is caused by the inferno we’ve been living in for decades in a country with a centuries-long specialty in de- vouring and vomiting back any kind of life for breakfast, lunch, dinner and two desserts. This feeling does not exclude the rest of the world – i.e. anger caused by this sterile hu- manity which, contrary to its own marketing, suffocates any kind of freedom, losing all feeling for right and wrong in the process.
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