258 | SERBIA INTERNATIONAL FILM GUIDE
Serbia Goran Gocić
F
or a few years, Shock Corridor, Aleksandar Radivojevic and Nenad Bekvalac’s television show about cinema, regularly preached more gore, more perversion, more violence and more Takashi Miike in Serbian cinema. Looking at some film releases over the last year, someone may have been listening.
Srdjan Todorovic in Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Movie
Radivojevic’s own A Serbian Movie (Srpski film) was about an unemployed actor who strays into the Serbian porn underworld. Radivojevic significantly contributed to the trend with his masterful stage play, Suicidal Hook, starring Bekvalac, which premiered in 2009. It seems that a self-styled horror genre has finally forced its way into the Serbian cinema.
Emilio Rosso in Milan Todorovic and Milan Konjevic’s Zone of the Dead
Among the first Serbian premieres in 2009 was Zone of the Dead (Zona mrtvih), a zombie horror film shot in English (in the notoriously polluted Belgrade suburb of Pancevo), with a local crew and starring Ken Foree (who appeared in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). This Serbian-Italian-Spanish coproduction, directed by Milan Konjevic and Milan Todorovic, was one of the few original franchises made here. It was followed by Mladen Djordjevic’s The Life and Death of a Porn Gang (Zivot i smrt porno bande), a smart, socially conscious slasher that smacked of early John Waters. A bunch of losers decide to hit the road and present their porn theatre in the Serbian backwaters. Their luck changes when a German businessman asks them to make snuff movies. And finally, Aleksandar
Here and There (Tamo i ovde), an excellent debut feature by Darko Lungulov (a SerbianUS-German co-production), was awarded the New York Best Narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. Told with unusual subtlety, it is the story of a down-and-out American musician, played by David Thornton, who is involved in a fake marriage scheme to a Serbian woman. Singer Cyndi Lauper features in a cameo role. The Belgrade Phantom (Beogradski fantom), a Serbian-Hungarian-
Jovan Todorovic’s The Belgrade Phantom