Gordana Đurđević-Dimić
Kristina is a transgender sex worker in Serbia. She plays herself in an eponymous film that portrays her daily life with reticence in accordance with the rules of fiction. We’re in Kristina’s home with her. With camp elegance, she contentedly arranges ikebana in the luxuriant, baroque shade of her garden. The surprisingly shrill ringtone of her telephone disrupts the idyllic scene and Kristina reels off the prices of her services to the caller. Tracing an inner journey in the secret calm of churches and forests, the film also opens up a space of confession in its core, in frontal shots where Kristina tells her story. It does not, however, follow the path of repentance. On the contrary, it asserts the profound freedom of a modern woman, captured majestically in a bold portrait with strokes inspired by iconostases that tend towards the divine.
Relying on the work of Letonian scientist Constantine Raudive, Marko Mazibrada, a psychiatrist disappointed in his profession, performs experiments aimed to empirically determine whether there is life after death, by phenomenon of apophenia. Together with Simon Besedić, alcoholic and editor of Armageddon Monthly, the magazine that deals with the paranormal phenomena, Nikola Mrzopoljić, manual labourer and paterfamilias, and Eta, pharmacist and unusual prostitute which Besedić offers a relationship, he experiences a sequence of weird events...
Sedam I Po is a Serbian movie. Seven stories from the hood that connects the leitmotif of the seven deadly sins, in a comic way of treating everyday life if Belgrade people, possessed by it's own small weaknesses. Tthey do not hesitate to go beyond the moral, since each of them understands morality in their own way. The story of the seven deadly sins, however, is not moralizing - it reveals that in spite of sin and errors there is a moment of purification and redemption of the hero. Their lives are not sinful in the Christian sense, their weaknesses are consequence of the times we live in. Pride, in despair, sloth, envy, anger, greed, debauchery and intemperance in eating and drinking - to include a biblical sin, but in modern times would be almost absurd in the context of a much bigger and worse problems of civilization. Therefore, the scenario calls for constant laughter - master your fears and problems, laugh at myself in it; it is a way of overcoming his own pain.
Goose Feather (Serbian: Jesen Stiže, Dunjo Moja) was Serbia submission to the 77th Academy Awards for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not accepted as a nominee. Vaguely based on a song By Djordje Balasevic called "Prica o Vasi Ladackom" (the story of Vasa Ladacki). The story is about a very poor boy that wanted abundance and wealth because he basically didn't own anything. He was in love with an equally poor girl that his father wouldn't accept. He moves to another village and starts drinking...
The story of the film is set in the period from the 1940s until today in the Pannonian plain (the plain in the Central Europe), in an area of elusive boundaries, mysterious and unstable spiritual identity. The witness of the time is a Jewish boy Benya Cohn who, with his eye wide open, remembers the tragedy of his family, in the shadow of the Holocaust, concentration camps and new wars.
