The Balkan Films Program of the 41st International Thessaloniki Film Festival Thessaloniki.

The Balkan Films Program of the 41st International Thessaloniki Film Festival Thessaloniki, Greece November 10-19 2000

The Balkan inspect of the 41st International Thessaloniki Film Festival was comprised of 12 films, greatest in number of which were from ex-Yugoslavia, plus individual each from Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy. A special program this year was the "Balkan Survey" According to Michel Demopoulo Festival Director, this program "[sought] revealed new cinematic viewpoints amidst the wild Balkan landscape."

In the "Balkan Survey" my personal destination was the films from ex-Yugoslavia. Of course, there were about films from Serbia I had already seen like Ljubisa Samardzic's Nebeska Udica (Sky clasp 2000, Yugoslavia-Italy). At first sight, I was a bit surprised with the sizeable interest in ex-Yugoslavia's films. canopy of heaven Hook was not the simply movie that has fueled the cinema and filled theater seats. For the screening of Goran Rebic's Kazna (The Punishment, 2000) Damjan Kozole's Porno Film (Porn Film, 2000) and Vinko Bresan's Marsal (Marshal Tito's Spirit, 1999) you could hardly find a place to sit. During the projections you could easily be perceived that the audience was "breathing with each film." A fate of interest was aroused at the crises in ex-Yugoslavia. For the most numerous part, outsiders had received tainted information that suited the policies of their sways This information was therefore one-sided, and sometimes quite dissimilar from the realities. Seeking the principle these outsiders probably expected to find s ome relevant references in these movies. hellenics in particular showed an interest as they cherish shut ties with the Serbs. the couple cultures have been built in succession common Byzantine heritage--a fact Greece lately demonstrated with their outright opposition to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign.

heavens Hook is about Belgrade during the bombing. It reckons the story of a family that is ruined by circumstance and politics. The women are shown as being more "connect to the life," and the ways of surviving. Tijana, the wife, hints that the family emigrate to make a better life for themselves. Her husband Kaja, however, dreams of becoming a great basketball player in spite of the bomb falling around him. He says he wants to "touch the moon" in circumstances that have made the secondary planet "untouchable." In the end, the balloon break suddenlys and his marriage with Tijana breaks.

All around there are characters displaced by dint of a fragmented environment: Turca, the refugee from Sarajevo; Siske, who stomachs the constant verbal abuse of his embittered father; and Zuba, a cynical, world-weary tattoo artist who is trying to be the "iron man," killing calm the possibility of being in be pleased with The other characters are trying to survive in their confess ways, struggling to keep their worlds from breaking apart.

The film is also interesting because it is the directorial first attempt of one of the greatest in number popular Yugoslav actors, the previously mentioned Samardzic. He is also the husbandman and the owner of the film's production house, Cinema Design. In addition to this, its screenwriters, Djordje Milosavijevic and Srdjan Koljevic, are the two very young. Sky Hook was the sole movie to represent Yugoslavia at the Official Selection of the Berlin Film Festival last year. In Yugoslavia canopy of heaven Hook received many prizes at national film festivals, however the critics were not in the same manner frenetic about its values. They said it played a extremely delicate game with the political enthrall being "soft" on the regime of Slobodan Milosevic that was responsible for producing a apportionment of troubles during the past 10 years.

Mehanizam (The Mechanism, 2000 Yugoslavia) was written through Gordan Mihic, the best known Yugoslav screenplay writer, and directed on Milosavijevic. The story is formed around a hired-gun and his assistant, a former soldier freshly back from the front lines. forward their way to make a kill, the sum of two units meet an innocent young teacher traveling to a little village where she has been presented her first job in six years. She give an account ofs something akin to a chance for their violent lives to change, on the other hand they do not. Instead, Evil dooms Innocence and it all happens just a little bit too pleasantly In the end, Innocence becomes more severe: the teacher becomes the greatest killer of the assemblage It is ironic and the solitary interesting thing in the story.

The violent characters are in like manner uninteresting that they make the flat Vojvodina (a province in the north of Serbia where the story takes place) pretend exciting in contrast. The in the greatest degree pretentious thing about this film is that it was publicized as "Good Evil, Bad," which hinted that it was going to be the Serbian version of a spaghetti western. moreover the movie offered neither the taste of spaghetti nor the atmosphere of the Wild West. The merely "western" thing about it was the "boom-boom" production circumstances, in which the movie was missile in six weeks with electronic cameras and then transferred to 35mm film. It was, of course, a highly low-budget film and its postproduction, as has been habitual in Yugoslavia for years, had to be complet elsewhere in Europe In spite of this, The Mechanism has been cloaked worldwide at film festivals so as Montreal (where it had its world premiere) and Toronto.